“Snake clan descendents … must take the tjuringa back. Dingo Clan needs it … Wandjina say it bin go back.”
Tom asked, “Where is it?”
A long pause ensued. Margaret sensed the strange presence fading and felt a very strong urge to step back into the pool of light.
Finally the answer came, very slowly, in a whisper. Tom leaned forward.
“This body is tiring … we must release it … we do not see place and time as you do … we bin see tjuringa energy dim, buried in earth … we see you and this one … small balls of light … we see threads of your lives branching and intersecting with others …” Margaret’s eyes closed as she slid toward the pool of light.
Margaret shifted her weight, slowly stretching out her cramped legs. It took her a minute or two to feel firmly seated back in her body. She desperately needed something to drink and could have gulped a quart of juice if they’d had some handy.
“Thirsty,” she croaked, opening her eyes.
Tom stood up. “Hang loose.” She went out of the room to the kitchenette and returned a minute later with two sodas. Margaret downed nearly the whole can in a single long swallow.
“Sorry I didn’t write all that stuff down,” said Tom, “but I didn’t want to step outside the circle for a note pad.”
Margaret put down the can. “That’s okay, I remember most of it. What do you think would have happened if you had gone outside the circle?”
Tom shrugged. “Maybe nothing, but I didn’t want to chance it. You got some serious mojo happening. How come you never mentioned you could do that?”
“I didn’t know.”
“So, like, you’re telling me this is the first time you ever channeled? Awesome.”
Margaret was grinning and trembling slightly, the exhilaration of the experience lingering in her blood like champagne bubbles. “Yeah, it was. Thanks, Tom, I would’ve been scared if you hadn’t been here. I’m not sure I want to do it again, it was a really weird feeling, but it was worth it once.”
“What’s this Sky Home place?”
“That’s like heaven to the Aborigines, in Australia. I learned that from my mom. It’s where their gods hang out and maybe people go there when they die, but I’m not sure about that. The Ancestors who made all the land and animals and people went there after it was all done. I gotta ask Kinigar, ‘cause he says his cousin’s uncle is a shaman, and he knows all these Dreamtime stories. I can’t wait to message him about what just happened!”
Tom yawned hugely and stretched. “I’m gonna bag it. Stay up if you want, I don’t mind.”
“So, like, Tom, did you and Devin …?”
“Did we do it?”
“Yeah. Did you?”
“I’ll tell yah someday.”
Tom went to her closet and took her nightshirt off the handle. Margaret couldn’t bring herself to tell Tom about the Quinkan pulling it off onto the floor. Just the thought of the form it had taken this time creeped her out beyond anything she’d ever seen it do. She had almost forgotten about it because it hadn’t bothered her in so long, but this was far worse than dreams. Of course it would take the shape that repulsed her the most. But she wondered, would it have been solid to the touch, or had it just been an illusion to scare her?
She sat down at the computer. Remembering the few times she’d actually seen the Quinkan in daylight, it had looked pretty damned solid. Then she recalled what the Rai had said about splitting it apart from her, and something about a sacred object being stolen. She really needed to talk to Kinigar again.
She logged on and was overjoyed to see he was still there. What time was it in Australia, anyway? She pinged him.
“Kini-kun! u wont believe what just happened. I channeled some spirits who said they were the Rays or something, from Sky Home!!! What do u think about that? XD M-chan.”
“M-chan! Was worried about u.” A pulsing heart smiley was appended to the end of the sentence.
Margaret chewed her finger. Kini had just sent her a heart, that same Kinigar whose picture was so cute she could eat him up. She resolved to have Tom take some more pictures to send him tomorrow. She also hoped to God Kini was the real deal and not some hopeless dork masquerading as a hot Ozzie.
Tom returned, gave Margaret a pat on the head, and crawled into her bed without a word. Almost immediately her breathing became regular and deep. Margaret wished she could fall asleep, snap, just like that. It was another of Tom’s enviable talents.
A second message rolled in above Kinigar’s first.
“How did ur mom call the Wandjinas? she Aboriginal or sumthin?”
“No, long story. Kini, I have so much 2 tell u.” She sent him a confused smiley with crossed eyes and launched into the whole long story of Alice and the Land of Legends exhibit saga as she understood it. When she told how the Quinkan acted like a sidekick for a demon preacher who threatened to kill her mom, and then how the Wandjinas came to her rescue in the middle of a thunderstorm with an Ancestor called the Lightning Man, Kinigar cut in.
“WHAT THE FUKK??? M-chan, shamans train all their lives to do stuff like that! I dun think u need any help from me!”
“No, see, I do coz I dun understand this stuff. The Rays told me it couldn’t separate us from the Quinkan until some Dingo Clan thingy got returned. I hafta figure out what that means.” She then described as best she could remember the gist of her channeling experience.
“Does ur mom channel 2? Like, does it run in yer family?” he wrote back.
“I dunno. She has weird dreams sometimes. Like this one she had when we went to Miami for my grandma Suzanne’s funeral.” Margaret recounted Alice’s dream of the black cockatoos with the small black and white bird that chased them away.
“Fukkkkk, M-chan. That was a willy wagtail, u know what that means?? They show up just before somebody dies. Was anybody in that dream besides ur mom?”
“I dunno, just her, I guess. That’s all I know.”
“This is dangerous shit. Spirits like that show up to meet u when u cross over to the other side, like I mean die. M-chan, I think your mom’s in danger or maybe u.”
Margaret felt shivery again. She was thinking the same.
“Kini, what can I do?” She doubted those few words could possibly convey the sense of helplessness she felt at that moment.
He didn’t reply back immediately, and she wondered if maybe he’d lost his Internet connection. There was so much else she wanted to share with him but hardly knew how to get started. She stared at the screen, her mind a blank.
The IM title bar was flashing again: Kinigar is writing a message. She waited, holding her breath. She also saw that there was an attachment. She clicked on it and the image viewer opened, revealing the same wide smiling face of the kid beside the truck, only this time he was sitting in a desk chair in what was clearly a boy’s bedroom. An electric guitar on a rumpled plaid bedspread was dimly visible in the background. He was wearing a black concert T-shirt of a German metal band both she and Tom adored.
“Just took this with meh digicam,” he wrote. “Print it out and u can have me with u all the time, for protection.”
Margaret reread the message several times, feeling a tiny sting of tears under her eyelids. Please, she begged whatever powers there were, let him be real and not some troll pretending to be cool.
She wrote back, typing fast and not reading over what she’d written. “XXXDDD!! ur so freakin hawt Kini. Do you hve a girlfrind?”
He replied immediately. “No. r u taken?”
“No.”
“Then I claimz you. *tackleglomps* Ish mine!”
Margaret hugged herself, suppressing her fangirl squee to a mere eep, for fear of waking Tom. She responded, “*claimz u back* Nice Ozzie kitteh *puts a collar on u, drags u away* Hehe.”
“Rawr. Send more pix, K?” he responded.
“I will! Kini, what’s your full name?”
“Jason K. Trescott. What’s yers?”
“Margaret Ali
ce Sullivan. Middle name is my mom’s, last name is my dad’s but Mom went back to Waterston. I like M-chan best.”
“Coolness. Byes for now.”
“Laters.” She saw his username disappear as he signed off. She yawned and rubbed her eyes, only then admitting how exhausted she was. It was approaching two A.M., according to the computer clock.
Margaret fell onto her bed, too fatigued to even change clothes or go pee. The camp wakeup call would come much too soon, and she had a lot of things to do tomorrow, the most important of which was to find a way to print out Kinigar’s smiling face. She intended never to be parted from it again.
But instead of falling asleep, she lay awake, her brain too wired to shut down. It had been a tumultuous birthday, to say the least. Terrifying and exhilarating, but the best part was that plain old Margaret Sullivan that nobody ever paid any attention to now had an official boyfriend who was sixteen, played an electric guitar, listened to Rammstein, and was as cute as a koala bear. He was so made of win she could hardly stand it.
Chapter 21
August 11, Thursday—Present Day
Late summer sunlight pierced the trees off to his right as Nik pounded down the one-mile stretch of Black Creek Ferry Road leading back to Alice’s house. He estimated that when he reached the driveway he would have done a forty-five minute jog with a good wind sprint at the end. It pleased him that at twenty-seven he could make a run like this as easily as he had done at twenty.
Dawg galloped joyfully ahead of him, tail flogging the air in wide loops like a canine propeller. Running like this, with muscle and sinew and bone all working as one to propel the mass of his body through space, Nik embraced the runner’s euphoria. At these moments, he loved being alive. Not that he would confess such a thing to anyone … it was just a silent acknowledgement. Alice would say he embraced his inner Dawg.
The two of them dashed down the curving driveway to the house, slowing up when they reached the sandy front yard. The bay where Alice parked her car was empty, so he assumed she was still at that meeting of the county historical society she’d been invited to by a coworker. She’d said it might be dark before she got home, in which case he was to feed himself, and she’d eat leftovers when she returned.
With Margaret still at camp, Nik and Alice tended not to make sit-down meals. Thinking of Margaret, he wondered how she was doing. They hadn’t heard from her since she’d called to thank them for the birthday gift card to her favorite music store five days ago, but that was to be expected. Margaret was spreading her wings and experiencing some independence, which they both agreed was a good thing.
He walked briskly around the yard, cooling down, letting his breathing slow and his pulse settle back to its normal rate. Dawg immediately began nosing around in the remnants of Alice’s summer garden, poking his head into hydrangea bushes before peeing on them and following his nose to the edge of the clearing. Then with a loud yawp he was off into the trees, on the trail of whatever had snagged his interest.
Dripping wet, Nik went up the stairs, peeling off his sodden T-shirt and draping it over the deck rail before going inside. He discarded the rest of his clothes and his shoes on the bedroom floor and got in the shower, turning on just the cold water. He’d adapted somewhat to the hot, humid climate of Florida, but had to admit that the Nordic component of his physiology longed for ice and snow, for freezing cold and whitened breath. He stood under the showerhead with his face upturned to the chilled well water, feeling the heat drain away from his body.
Standing in the shower, thinking, Nik thought about Alice. Six months ago, in Norway and Sweden, she’d been a good travel companion, eager to see and experience whatever presented itself. She’d charmed his parents, proving that he’d been right to insist she come with him on the Mycological foray in Trondheim. When they’d returned home in late February, she’d seemed happy, and healed.
But lately she was more hard-edged and bitchy, cold even, and it was affecting all of them. Frowning, Nik turned off the water and stepped out onto the bathroom rug. He wanted his old Alice back, the one he’d met when he first worked at the museum as a contracted illustrator, but he was beginning to suspect that she didn't exist anymore, that she’d been permanently changed by those experiences she regarded as supernatural.
Whether indeed something unnatural had taken place with her Dreamtime exhibit and her research into local history, Nik couldn’t say. She had been fixated on a crumbling wooden church located on a deserted county road about four miles away, convinced something paranormal had taken place there. Nik toweled his body, replaying in his head those scenes from last year … pieces of evidence he still couldn’t get his head around, such as the wild dog he’d shot in the eye in the woods beyond Alice’s house. It had leaped at him, hit his chest with its monstrous paws, and then disappeared in front of his eyes. He shook his head, spraying water droplets. Then there was that freak storm that had blown through the neighborhood, blasting the front door off its hinges and trashing the living room where he’d found Alice unconscious on the floor.
That event had shocked him and, he had to admit, frightened him on several levels; he’d been alarmed for her safety, but he’d also been unable to rationally construct how the scene of destruction could have come about. Margaret seemed to have no trouble accepting what she claimed was obvious: the Dreamtime Wandjinas had come to rescue her mother, or her rescue had been a by-product of the retribution visited on the phantom preacher Alice believed she’d called from some other dimension into this one.
Try as he might, Nik simply could not accept the notion of anyone being haunted by creatures that manifested from somewhere outside the here and now. He could almost accommodate the notion of consciousness existing beyond the physical plane, but to have it deliberately haunt one’s dreams and invoke visions of terror that could cause bodily harm was to admit a universe he’d stolidly denied most of his life. The closest he could get to it was the ongoing scientific discussion of extra dimensions that might resemble membranes or strings or some other construct du jour. He could discuss in speculative terms a model whereby planes of these unknown universes might bump up against each other and somehow bleed into one another, but outright belief in the supernatural he held at arm’s length.
Alice had said, when she’d recovered enough to try to describe what had happened on that afternoon of rain and shrieking wind, that an Aboriginal god, an Ancestor called Namarrkun, had come down and taken away the vile thing named Cadjer Harrow, a character whom she admitted to having largely invented from a few scraps of nineteenth-century newspaper reporting. She also believed that her own consciousness had been scooped up along with Harrow’s and transported out into the cosmos. To the Milky Way. Sky Home in Aboriginal terms, she’d said. These were things he didn’t like to think about, which was why he kept up his jogging routine, even on the hottest days of summer: running cleared his mind.
Nik toweled his hair dry and went out into the hallway. He heard Dawg barking outside in a barrage of yipping and yelping punctuated by growls that escalated into alarm barking. Nik wrapped the towel around his waist and looked out the bedroom window to see if anyone had driven up in the yard. Seeing nothing, he went out onto the deck and tried to course the direction of Dawg’s incessant yelping. It seemed to be coming from the trees behind the clearing at the back of the house.
He knew that he needed to get dressed and go check on Dawg, but his thoughts kept returning to Alice and the events of last year. As much as they had all tried to settle back into a pattern of normalcy, tacitly agreeing to carry on as if nothing had happened, he still thought about those fear-filled months all the time and assumed both Alice and Margaret did as well. How could they not?
So, it bothered him that Alice had gotten involved with the history of the church down the road again, because it seemed clear to him that had been the origin of her problems. For whatever reason, she’d begun to imagine seeing characters from an aborted novel she’d been researching and hal
lucinating spectral visitations. These delusions had temporarily driven them apart, and it was mainly his concern over her physical safety, and Margaret’s, that had brought him back. But once he’d come back, he made a commitment to stay, because for that brief time when they’d been separated, he’d found himself surprisingly lonely.
He firmly believed that for a couple to make it together, they should support each other through whatever crises might occur in their lives. But in this case, the problem was that although he felt competent to physically protect the property and make sure Alice got proper medical attention when she’d been mauled by the feral dog, he’d been unprepared to help her in the way she’d obviously needed most: confirmation of the unreal.
The dog attack, however, had been real enough … at least, her injuries from it were real. She had a torn coat and a dislocated shoulder to prove it. And his own chase of the beast and confrontation down by the pond in the woods had certainly been real. Remembering that encounter brought his focus back to the edge of the trees where Dawg continued to yelp. Nik could just make out the movement of his tail and rear end near a fallen beech just off the beginning of the footpath.
“Hej, Dawg!” Nik whistled sharply and the barking ceased. Dawg came trotting into the yard, his head up and tail beating his hindquarters. Even without his glasses, Nik could see that Dawg’s fur wasn’t bristled, so whatever had excited him didn’t appear to be threatening.
“Wait, Mutt-butt,” he called, using Margaret’s favorite nickname. “I’m coming there in a minute.” Dawg danced around the yard, seeing his master leaning over the rail, and then he bounded off into the woods again. Soon Nik heard his yipping resume with renewed excitement.
Nik went to the bedroom and found a clean T-shirt and jeans. Normally, with the weather so hot, he would have opted for gym shorts, but if he was going to have to go into the woods he wanted his legs protected from briars and biting insects. He found a clean pair of socks after much rummaging in the bottom dresser drawer that Alice had allocated for his use, put his running shoes back on, and tossed his sweaty jogging shorts and socks on top of the towering mound in the corner hamper. Between Alice and himself the pile grew at an alarming rate; one of them would have to break down and do the laundry soon.
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