The Ledberg Runestone

by Patrick Donovan

  “And thank God for that.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Problem is,” Waylon continued, “I run a cash-only business.”

  “That sounds like your problem,” I said. “I’m paid up.”

  Waylon looked like he’d been slapped in the face.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said that’s your problem.”

  “Well, I can’t say I find this change of attitude very becoming of you. I might find it in me to be insulted.”

  “I’m too tired for your crap right now, Waylon,” I said, and I sounded it.

  “That right?”

  I nodded towards the pouch on the table.

  “Take it. We’re square.”

  “Well, tired or not, like I said, I run a cash business. Now, I can count that towards say, I don’t know, twenty percent of the balance, but—”

  “Stop talking.”

  If Waylon looked like he’d been slapped earlier, now he looked like I’d slapped his mother.

  “We’re paid up. That’s more than what I owe you. You know people that can turn that into cash. I’m not doing this crap with you anymore, Waylon. We’re done.”

  Waylon snuffed his cigarette out on the table and dropped the butt on the floor. He slid his mostly empty beer glass to the side and leaned forward, staring into my face.

  “Listen to me, you little son of a bitch—”

  “No,” I said, interrupting him. “You listen. You and your brother have threatened me, hounded me, sent me to the hospital, threatened to off my father, and generally just been complete and utter douchebags.”

  Waylon opened his mouth to say something.

  “I’m not finished.”

  Surprisingly enough, Waylon shut his mouth.

  “It works like this. We’re squared up now. If you come near me again,” I said, leaning forward so we were almost face to face. I kept my hands in the front pocket of my sweatshirt. “I will play hell on your life in ways you don’t even think are possible.”

  “Was that a threat?” Waylon asked through clenched teeth. I was pretty sure, in his entire life, no one had ever spoken to Waylon Carver like that. The pure rage radiating off him was palpable. His face had gone an almost unnatural shade of red. A vein stood out on his forehead, and both of his hands had clenched into tight fists on the tabletop.

  “Yeah, actually now that I think about it, it was,” I said.

  “You done screwed up,” Waylon said.

  “Yeah?” I asked, pulling my hands out of my pocket.

  “Yeah,” Waylon said, standing.

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I slapped him in the face. Hard. In the bar, even over the music, it sounded like a pistol shot. Heads turned towards us, half of them slack jawed and surprised that someone had just walked in here and slapped the boss. Blood streaked his face. Not his, mine. I’d been working up a little something for just this occasion.

  Shamans have used hallucinogenic herbs for ceremonies, dream walking, vision quests and a million other reasons for as long as there’s been magic to play with. Given law enforcement’s view on said substances, the most powerful were really, really hard to come by. The ayahuasca had cost me several hundred dollars for a few milligrams, and by itself it wasn’t that potent. South American tribes would mix it with other herbs and use it for healing and divination. With my blood and my intent behind it, activating its inherent magic, just the vine itself would make the Brown Acid from Woodstock look like a happy daydream. Within seconds the magic would take hold and it would cause Waylon to see any multitude of different planes of existence, up to and including the spirit world, heaven, and hell.

  It took less than a second. Waylon’s eyes widened, pupils filling out and overtaking the normal gray color of his eyes. He opened his mouth to scream, but it was silent, his face pulled into a rictus grin of pure terror. He fell back into the booth, his body taut, trembling.

  I grabbed the pouch of gold off the table, leaned over and put it in his hand and stood.

  “Told you so,” I said, grabbing a napkin off the table and clenching it tightly in my fist.

  I grabbed my cane and headed towards the door, item number one on my to-do list thoroughly and decisively marked off.

  Chapter 33

  I was unlocking the door to my truck when Bec appeared, sitting in the passenger seat. She looked mostly translucent. I could see the shopping center near the Poor Confederate through her. Given that she was materializing in the real world, she wouldn’t be able to hang around for long. Even for a spirit as powerful as her, maintaining this was taxing as hell. I slid into the truck beside her, and started the engine.

  “I found who you’re looking for,” she told me, her voice sounding far away, like she was talking to me from the bottom of a well.

  “Where?”

  Images flashed through my mind. Trees. A paved hiking path. A cave. A stone profile similar to a face, against a sunset-painted sky. I knew the place.

  The Devil’s Courthouse.

  It was very, very cliché.

  The Devil’s Courthouse had its fair share of urban legends surrounding it. The devil held court in the caves within the mountain, being amongst the most colorful. The Cherokee believed that there was a giant that lived there. A few scholars had disagreed, but the legends had stuck. The local fare, strange noises at night, people seeing apparitions and all manner of oddball things kept the stories alive.

  The images faded as quickly as they had come.

  “My old man? The girl with him?”

  “Both safe and sound,” Bec said.

  I turned towards the passenger seat, to thank her again. Of course, it was empty. I took a deep breath, shook my head to clear it, and put the truck in gear. Something was going on inside the Poor Confederate, judging from the number of people that had started filing out of the door, most of them moving at a full-on run. The screaming and the wailing sirens in the distance sort of tipped me off, too.

  I didn’t hang around. I figured the screaming, running, and sirens had something to do with Waylon and, as such, I should make myself scarce.

  I spent what little time I had driving towards the Devil’s Courthouse. I wasn’t entirely sure where Lysone was going to be, but I had a hunch. Most spells that require a certain natural event, an eclipse, a storm, or what have you, had to be done in view of said event. Kari had mentioned the moon so I figured in full view was about as good as it got.

  That would mean a long half-mile hike to the top. On foot. My leg was already aching at the thought. Most folks without a bum leg and a cane would consider the hike strenuous. For me, with a bad pin, it was going to be quite the climb.

  It took me the better part of an hour to reach the observation deck, but it was well worth it. The view was pretty stellar. Supposedly, from where I was standing, beside a waist-high stone wall, you could see into Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia. The rock face jutted out in front of me. There were a few folks, couples mostly, wandering around and taking in the view, but from what I could see there was no sign of Lysone.

  It dawned on me while I was standing there that, while I’d been all set to do this, I had nothing that even remotely resembled a plan. I had time, though. I’d gotten here first, which gave me a chance to set things up before Lysone got here to enact whatever this spell was.

  I was going to have to hit her hard, fast, and I’d probably only get a chance to do it once. I started to take stock of my surroundings, and of my situation. I was in a location that was mostly natural, thus if I needed a spiritual ally of some sort, my choices were mostly elementals or animal. Neither were easy to deal with, though the animal spirits were worse. They were, outside of the oldest and most powerful, direct as all hell. They served their nature. It pretty much came down to eat, sleep, reproduce, rinse and repeat.

  I walked away from the observation deck and into the trees, letting my mind wander. I was mostly just waiting for an idea to hit me, taking in the scenery as I went. Fading
sunlight filtered in through the trees, casting a warm, golden glow over everything. I used my cane, turning over rocks and brushing aside sticks as I went.

  I was maybe three hundred yards into the tree line when I found exactly what I was looking for. The yellow jacket nest was nestled under a rocky outcropping and it was, for lack of a better term, freaking huge. Nearly a foot high, twice as long, and all but covered with the violent little yellow-and-black, six-legged assholes of nature.

  I found a small log and sat down, resting my leg and watching the wasps mill about the nest. Mainly, I wanted to rest for a minute, but it wouldn’t hurt me to get my head straight before I broke on through to the other side and started making even more deals with spirits.

  After a few moments, I settled my head back, closed my eyes, and let my consciousness drift. Given that time passed differently on the other side, I had to be quick about this. Five minutes could pass here and it would feel like hours in the spirit world. On the flip side, hours could pass on this side and it feel like five minutes on the other side. The last thing I wanted to do was go through all this trouble, only to pop back over here after the party had already ended.

  When I opened my eyes, I was fully in the spirit world. It was more primordial here, due to the fact that I was in surroundings that were definitively more natural. Trees towered overhead, each one adorned with leaves as big as dinner plates or pine needles the length of drum sticks, reaching into a sky the color of sapphires. In the distance, I heard bird song so beautiful and clear that it was almost painful to hear. A butterfly, its wings each a perfect kaleidoscope of greens and purples, drifted by lazily.

  The hive sat directly across from me. Its spirit world equivalent was massive, at least double what it was in the physical world. The outside had been crafted with intricate whorls and twists, giving it an artistic bent that was strangely ordered and hypnotic if you stared at it too long.

  I took a few steps towards the hive, making sure my movements were slow and without any sort of intent that could be construed as threatening. It got their attention. An angry buzzing sound, the sound of thousands upon thousands of insect wings coming alive in unison filled the air. They started pouring out of the nest, each one as long as my finger, creating a massive black cloud of spiritual, winged nastiness for nastiness’ sake in the air in front of me.

  The yellow jackets formed a sphere around me, the sound of their combined wings near deafening. When they spoke, it was as a single entity, each hornet’s voice a small part of a much larger, and much louder whole.

  “You have disturbed the hive. Why?” the thousands of voices asked.

  “I seek an audience with your queen,” I said.

  “For what purpose?” The voices came again.

  “I need help,” I said.

  “Seek it elsewhere,” they said.

  “Then an arrangement,” I said.

  “To what purpose?”

  “I told you, I wish to speak to your queen. Not you.”

  The swarm buzzed angrily, twisting and writhing over itself, yet still holding the spherical shape around me. I could smell something in the air, pheromones, or the spiritual equivalent. It smelled odd, like wood smoke and burning sugar.

  The buzzing increased, and through the swarm, I saw a shape roughly the size of a large house cat rise up out of the hive. The swarm separated and the queen of the hive flew into the sphere of hornets, the massive wall of thought-formed insects closing behind her. She stopped, hovering just a few inches from my face.

  The queen of the hive was beautiful. Sure, she looked like a giant winged distributor of pain and misery, but her colors, the yellow and black stripes, were brighter, more alive than the real-world counterpart. Her wings threw out flashes of color, reflecting the sunlight back like prisms. It was her eyes though, that really got me. They were black, almost mirror-like, but they held an almost frightening level of intelligence. The queen’s stinger was exposed, a six-inch spike of obsidian black. Venom dripped from its tip, each drop smoking as it hit the ground, eating away at the soil, only for the earth spirits in the ground to fill in the hole almost instantaneously.

  “You have our attention,” the queen said.

  Chapter 34

  I offered the queen of the yellow jackets a bow.

  “Your majesty,” I said. “I need your help.”

  “To what ends? We are only listening because of your stupidity, not your social graces.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,” I said.

  “Speak your piece, Spirit Talker,” the queen said.

  “There’s a woman coming here. She has something I mean to take. I need your help to do such.”

  “And that is our concern how?”

  “Because I’m coming to you for an arrangement, not a handout.”

  The queen’s head tilted to the side. Okay, maybe not tilted. It’s probably easier to say it rotated a full forty-five degrees.

  “What arrangement?” the queen asked.

  “A mutually beneficial one,” I said. “A tribute to your hive. Food, perhaps? For the winter?”

  There was a murmur of wings and the queen drifted closer to me. One of her antennae twitched ever so slightly. Her head rotated in the opposite direction, mandibles clacking against each other with a hungry intensity.

  “Perhaps we will take you as tribute, payment for disturbing us?”

  “Perhaps,” I said with a slight shrug. This was exactly how I’d expected this conversation to go. Hornets, by their nature, are territorial creatures. On this side of the metaphysical fence, that was just amped up to eleven. I’d walked onto their turf and asked for a meeting with the boss, no introductions, no nothing.

  “Unfortunately, you don’t understand how my world works,” I said.

  The queen’s head rotated in the opposite direction. The smell of pheromones got thicker. If I were standing in the physical world, I’d probably be gagging.

  “Perhaps you should not assume that we care?” the queen said.

  “Maybe you don’t. You could have your hive kill my other body,” I said, nodding back towards my actual physical body, which was propped against a tree. To most anyone that passed, I’d just look like I was asleep. Granted, I was pretty sure no one would venture this far off the path. If they did, they’d hear the nest long before they saw it. The buzzing chorus of a couple thousand of nature’s flying douchebags would be more than enough to keep any intelligent person back. I tried not to think about what that said about my levels of stability.

  “But you should,” I said, matter of fact.

  The queen stared at me.

  “You sting me over there, somebody will find me. They’ll need to remove my carcass. That means they’ll have to torch your nest. You off me here, I’ll sit there until I starve, or someone finds me. End result is the same. To get me out, your nest has gotta go. We both know what that means. There’s a balance, one side affects the other.”

  Which was the plain and simple truth. The spirit world was, essentially, a reflection of sorts of the physical world. There was a symbiotic relationship between the two planes of existence. Something here dies, it affects my side of things. For instance, if the queen were to die, the hive in the real world might die. If they were to destroy the nest in the real world, it would have consequences here. The buzzing got louder, becoming almost deafening. I could feel the motion of several thousands of wings, like a light breeze washing over my body. Some sort of communication passed through the hive, unheard by me. Finally, the queen drifted forward, the venom from her stinger falling less than a foot away from my toes, each drop leaving a bubbling, smoking hole in the earth. I curled my toes up in my shoes, just in case.

  “Make your offer,” the queen said finally.

  “Tribute, as I told you.”

  “In what form?”

  “You help me. Harm my enemy on my behalf and your children, in my world, will eat for the winter.”

  “And how will such an arrangement
benefit me? I will likely die before the first of the cold. I am old.”

  At this point, I was willing to agree to whatever she wanted. I only needed the yellow jackets to act as a distraction. I had no doubt that Lysone would make short work of the queen’s physical equivalent and her hive. So, I really didn’t have to honor any deal that I made.

  “Your hive continues,” I said. “You and your brood get to keep humming along and irritating the shit out of tourists.”

  “There is more I want,” the queen said. “A tribute of your essence.”

  I quirked a brow.

  A shaman’s blood is where their magic lies. It’s how I’m able to do the work I do. It, in its own right, is pretty potent stuff, especially to a spirit. It was the equivalent of a permanent steroidal boost to whatever spirit consumed it. If I gave up a bit of the red stuff, the queen would grow exponentially in power. Not a bad thing if she was my ally. It also meant I’d have to climb that damn hill up here every so often in the winter, in the cold, the snow and the ice, on a pretty regular basis until spring. A small price to pay to not get turned into a bloodstain when it was all said and done.

  “Consider it done,” I said.

  “Very well,” the queen said. “We will aid you. Now go.”

  I didn’t hang around to argue. I took a moment to focus, and when I opened my eyes I was back in the real world. The sun hung low in the sky, just above the horizon.

  That didn’t leave me a lot of time. I cut the palm of my hand, and held it out, open and outstretched. Within a matter of seconds, it was crawling with yellow jackets which, while being damn disconcerting, was kind of a rush. A moment later, they flew back to their nest, my palm cleaned of blood.

  Chapter 35

  I didn’t have a lot more prep time before Lysone showed up to concoct whatever concoction she was planning on concocting. Though, truth be told, there wasn’t much preparation to be done. I grabbed up a few herbs, shoved them into my bag and found a place a bit off the trail, but with a sight line that enabled me to watch the comings and goings along the path. For the most part, all I got to see were a few hikers, a few families with their kids, and the random hippie.