Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  The man hadn’t taken a step, but towered in front of him, reaching out that forefinger with a dab of blue ointment. His features were washed in a haze; Rafferty had no fear of him, though he suspected that he should. He had not yet breathed since the man stepped through the stone and out of the cliff.

  The finger touched his forehead, traced two circles there, and Rafferty could breathe. Time resumed its relentless march.

  The stranger turned on his heel, and Rafferty was compelled to follow. He couldn’t remember any of the man’s features, except that he was taller, dark and broad-shouldered. Though he had looked Rafferty straight in the eye, Rafferty had no memory of his eye color, or hair color, or the shape of his mouth.

  The stranger stood beside the discolored portion of the cliff, and Rafferty’s gaze was fixed by a blue glow in its center. The splash of blue flickered wildly on the rock, like two nightstalkers fighting in a sack. Suddenly the light widened to illuminate a passageway. The blue light loomed over the stranger’s shoulder like a huge pair of butterfly wings.

  He ushered the woman and her daughter through the passageway and into the cliff. Rafferty saw two silent flashes of light, and felt a rush of air from his nostrils. The stranger stood at the threshold and gestured Rafferty his turn.

  Rafferty couldn’t make his body not go.

  He’s the Jaguar!

  At that instant, Rafferty crossed the threshold and some blue vortex yanked him off his feet. He plummeted head-first into the cosmic peel. The northern lights streamed past, stood still, and he left them behind. Then, in a white flash, he left himself behind. . . .

  “Rafferty!”

  Afriqua Lee’s voice, she had his collar, yanking him back. . . .

  “Rafferty!” she whispered, and shook him again. “You fell asleep on the map light.”

  He smelled coffee, rubbed his face where he’d lain on his clipboard, and breathed a deep sigh under the pain tightening at his temples. Midnight, the Roam was nearly to their stake-down, and he was supposed to be piloting the Romni’s tent.

  “You jumped when I touched you,” she said. “You must have been out. Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” He breathed slow and deep. “Thanks to you.”

  He sipped the coffee. Sometimes coffee helped the headaches.

  “Thanks to me? What do you mean?”

  “The Jaguar almost had me. He’d hypnotized me or drugged me somehow, and I was going to be destroyed in a flash of light.”

  “How did I save you?”

  “I fell through the light and you yanked me back by the collar.”

  Afriqua Lee sighed and massaged the back of his neck.

  “Good thing it was just a nightmare,” she said. “If the Jaguar messes with you he’s going to answer to me.”

  Rafferty sipped his coffee and didn’t speak.

  “It was just a nightmare, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and rubbed his forehead. “We’d better get moving.”

  What did this dream say?

  A woman tried to protect her daughter, and lost them both. A bystander was lost as well.

  No, Rafferty told himself, not lost. Trapped. And the others were the bait.

  He didn’t like this notion of traps and bait. After stakedown he would bring this up again with Afriqua Lee.

  Humanity does not ask us to be happy.

  It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

  Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.

  —Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

  At sixteen, Eddie stared into his Uncle Bert’s bathroom mirror trying to decide whether he should start shaving or not.

  They’ll grow if I shave, he thought. That’s what Dr. Mark said happened to him.

  Shaving seemed like a lot of trouble, but the only other boy in the senior class who didn’t shave was Dwayne. Dwayne wore eye shadow and called himself “Darlene.” Eddie reminded himself that he was two years younger than the rest of the boys in his class, but it didn’t seem to help.

  The dark fringe of down on Eddie’s upper lip was only visible under the closest scrutiny, and today Eddie scrutinized closely. His lips were chapped because he’d had a cold, and he’d been breathing through his mouth when he slept. The air of the river valley had been unusually chilly and dry all spring. The seagulls flocked in early this evening, and low, so Eddie suspected rain tonight. Humidity might help heal his lips.

  They were not as full as Maryellen’s lips, nor were they the pencil-thin kind that reminded him of windburned cowboys like his Uncle Elmer.

  Kid lips, he thought, and smiled. Sixteen years under the belt but kid lips under the schnoz.

  His Uncle Bert always referred to their family’s distinctive nose as “the schnoz” or “the royalty.” Like old man Meyer’s nose, Eddie’s had an unmistakable pride to it that did not go unnoticed.

  Eddie saw in his drawn face, the darkness under his eyes, what the dreamways had done to him over the years. He and Maryellen were the youngest in their class but both of them looked older, even though he didn’t shave yet.

  He never thought of his as a hard life, just tiring; he placed the blame squarely on his dreams. His mouth held fast to enthusiasm. His prideful nose tempered his adolescence with a maturity that was not at all common among his peers; neither was it welcome.

  Eddie liked his teeth. They never gave him any trouble, and so far he’d only had to visit a dentist once for a checkup and a cleaning. His teeth were as white and regular as his mother’s had been darkened and craggy, but the dentist warned him, “Relax. You’re under too much stress and your teeth show it. You clench your jaw and grind your teeth in your sleep. A kid your age shouldn’t have to worry. Go fishing.”

  Eddie often wondered what his father’s smile had looked like.

  His eyes must be brown or green, he thought. Grandma said I got my mother’s blue eyes.

  He wondered what else he got from his father. The furrowed brow in the bomber photo was the same, the dark skin and dark hair, the same build that had started out lanky and was slowly filling out to muscle. The mystery of his father continued to haunt him.

  Facts were slippery, like the papers the military sends after a death, like the pension that his mother never received. One pressing fact remained—no two stories in his family agreed on how his father died, or where, or exactly when.

  He raised his dark eyebrows in sudden reflex, and tossed his head back like he saw his father do in the picture. Eddie was clearly a close match, even without the hat.

  His Uncle Bert opened the bathroom door and they startled each other.

  “Hey, Tiger, gettin’ all slicked up?”

  “Well, ah . . . just cleaning up, you know. . . .”

  “Maryellen called. She wants you to meet her down at the river. You better watch your step, boy. Her daddy’ll have your hide. You know what they said. . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Did she say what time?”

  “Four o’clock,” Bert said. “You’ve got an hour but goddammit it’s my turn in the bathroom.”

  The fishing shelter was nearly overgrown with the tall river grasses. Weeds bent down in each step she’d taken ahead of him, and were well-trampled where she’d waited on her favorite stone. Atop the stone, in lipstick, she’d drawn a square.

  He found her asleep behind the shack, her sleeping bag spread out on the grass. She slept to one side, as though she expected him to lie down beside her, so he did.

  She wore his gray track sweatsuit over a blue flannel workshirt, and tennis shoes heavy with new grass stains. Eddie didn’t know how she got his sweatsuit, but he liked the intimacy of her wearing it. The overcast afternoon was warm, and he thought they might get rained on.

  “Maryellen?”

  She was sound asleep, her breathing very slow.

  “Maryellen, it’s going to rain.”

  Eddie looked up and down the riverbank, and saw no one. Summer fishing on the river
didn’t open up for over a month, and even hoboes didn’t wander this far upriver. No one would stumble into their camp by accident, and his uncle was gone for the rest of the month to a job in Yakima.

  He attributed his sudden sense of dread to the incoming weather and to his regret at not being able to find Rafferty in his dreams for nearly a year. Dr. Mark explained it as progress. Eddie felt it as a loss. Something was wrong.

  “Maryellen?”

  He shook her shoulder half-heartedly, not really wanting to wake her.

  She was too deeply asleep to be napping.

  The square, he thought. Maybe she’s arranged a meeting.

  He lay down beside her and watched the clouds roll in. They wore the dark underbellies of a storm, but stayed high enough to clear the mountains and pass through. He would carry Maryellen into the fishing shack when the rains came. He didn’t want to disturb her. If she went to the dreamworld, she would probably be out for awhile.

  What will we do about her parents? he wondered. Her father was getting stranger every day. Mel Thompkins had taken to staying awake nights to check on Maryellen, and to keep him company during watch, he had his bottle. Eddie knew that Maryellen’s stepbrother was giving her trouble, too. He knew that more from what she didn’t say than what she did.

  Eddie took her hand and kissed it, then relaxed beside her for a quick nap before the weather hit. The last thing he expected was to cross the curtain in a blink to come face-to-face with Maryellen. And Rafferty, and Afriqua Lee.

  For the first time, all four of them met in the dreamworld. Eddie felt as though he and Maryellen dreamed now from inside the same body, they were so close.

  Sunny and still-winded, the dream sat the four of them inside a cedar grove, its evergreen fragrance

  ladened the warm afternoon.

  A square of marble columns on a square of marble floor stood high atop a stone structure in the middle of the woods. The fluted columns supported a sill of marble, open at the top. One of the columns was broken. Only a portion of its top and base remained. No debris littered the break.

  Inside the square stood a square marble table with four marble chairs. The surface of the table was inlaid with a sundial in brass, contained within a brass square. The back of each chair was carved with one of their names, each name bordered with the same brass square.

  They took the appropriate seats.

  Like sitting in on a séance without a medium, Eddie thought.

  No medium, no observers, just the four of them in an atrium sitting at a marble table.

  Rafferty spoke first, though his image was the weakest the four.

  “Someone is after us,” he warned. “I was caught some time ago by a Jaguar priest. He nabbed me coming out of the dreamway. I am sure he knows about Eddie, possibly Maryellen.”

  Suddenly, for Eddie, the daily threat that Rafferty faced became real.

  “We’re a threat to something big,” Rafferty said. “When they’re sure they’ve found us all, they’ll kill us.”

  “But the priests can’t cross into our world,” Eddie said. “They can’t come after me and Maryellen.”

  “The Jaguar is there,” Rafferty said, “I’m sure of it. But if he’s like us, he’ll be weaker on your side of the curtain. He uses his priests here as a lens or a coil, to boost his power. Somebody is getting close to me over here. . . .”

  Rafferty related his experience with Nabaj and his dream of the child in the canyon.

  “The Jaguar is much on my mind, too,” Afriqua Lee said, “and that gives him something to sniff out on the dreamways. We invite him in, follow him to his den…”

  Afriqua Lee paused; her green gaze flickered at Eddie.

  “…and then we kill him.”

  Nearby crow-calls punctuated their silence. Eddie cleared his throat.

  “What if we make a mistake, kill the wrong dreamer?”

  “Then the Jaguar wins,” Rafferty said, “and we die.”

  In their apprehensive silence, Eddie heard only his breathing.

  “A dream costs them, too,” Maryellen said. “Even that priest said so. The Jaguar probably pays his price, too.”

  “We pay for what we get,” Eddie said. “More time on the dreamways means more pain on the wakeup. If the Jaguar controls as much of your world as you think, he must either be asleep or in pain all of the time.”

  Rafferty frowned.

  “You’re right. When we conjure something, like this place, we’re down for a day or two. But Jaguar’s done earthquakes, plagues. . . .”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “He must be down for weeks after that.”

  “Maybe months,” Afriqua said. “Or longer.”

  “How could you live that long out cold?” Eddie asked. “You’d be helpless, you’d starve.”

  “Maybe he gets other people to dream for him,” Rafferty said. “Like that priest, Nebaj.”

  “Maybe he’s different from us altogether,” Afriqua said. “Maybe he’s an alien dreaming from someplace we haven’t imagined.”

  “We could be different from you,” Eddie said. “But if he’s from our side, he’s probably not different from us.”

  “He wouldn’t show himself,” Maryellen said. “He’d get into the dreams of someone who could keep track of us. . . .”

  “Let’s assume he’s more like us than different,” Rafferty said. “He uses the Jaguar priesthood to intensify his power, something we haven’t learned to do. But after a dream like that he’s got to be helpless. So, where is he?”

  “The priest says he’s in their world,” Afriqua said. “I agree.”

  “How do you know the priest wasn’t lying?”

  “The Jaguar’s experiments with the butterfly kiss devastate us, not you,” Rafferty said. “When matter from your side meets ours . . . poof. A flash of light, and it’s gone. Brain tissue dies when he gets careless.”

  “He’s experimenting,” Afriqua Lee said. “He doesn’t want to foul his own nest.”

  Rafferty leaned forward and his image intensified. The burn scar on the back of his hand shimmered slightly when he gestured.

  “When any of us plucks the fabric,” he said, “we affect both sides of the curtain. Some places are thinner than others, like the stonework in the highlands. But this valley we share is the thinnest.”

  “And the Jaguar must share it, too,” Afriqua Lee added. “His influence is strongest here. Passages to the dreamways easiest. He must be near you.”

  “‘Near’ meaning how near?” Eddie asked. “Ten feet, ten miles, ten thousand miles . . . ?”

  “Probably somewhere in the valley,” Rafferty said. “Someone helps him when he’s . . . sick.”

  “The Hill!” Maryellen broke in. “Eddie, he’s got to be on the Hill! Or some place like it. At least when he’s sick.”

  “Unless someone cares for him at home, someone professional. . . .”

  Ideas are entities.

  The thought rang in Eddie’s head like a messenger barging into a concert. Eddie felt as though someone was watching them from behind the columns. When he looked, he caught a flicker out of the corner of his vision and saw Ruckus ruffle himself on the ledge above him.

  “Search for sleep disorders, comas, catatonics…,” Maryellen suggested.

  “We could bait him,” Afriqua Lee suggested, “but one of you would have to be the bait.”

  “And one of you would have to know how to spring the trap.”

  Maryellen’s voice warbled a little. Eddie couldn’t see so well, anymore. A blue wash of light faded the scene, and her voice receded like a train down a tunnel.

  Eddie snapped out of the dream to a flash of pain in his head and belly. Cold, rain. Light stabbed at his eyes and someone slapped his face and the sting rushed tears to his eyes. Blurred forms of several men stood over him. One slapped him and shook his shoulders and shouted questions at him. As usual, Eddie was too sick to move, and he couldn’t make sense of their questions. One voice finally came in clear abo
ve all the others. Mel Thompkins.

  “He’s drugged up my daughter,” Thompkins shouted. “He’s killed her. I want that boy to hang.”

  Even though we may, ourselves, have created an “other” in our childhood,

  this other has not grown up, has become independent and autonomous,

  and like our child may no longer be under our control.

  —John Watkins, We The Divided Self

  “So,” Old Cristina said, “your dream is that strong.”

  Afriqua Lee lifted her head and was immediately sorry. The intense pain between her eyes flipped her stomach; even the fragrance of fresh coffee from Old Cristina’s light-pocket gagged her. After a flight down the dreamways, coffee had always been the only thing to bring her to her senses.

  “I . . .”

  No use, words only made things worse.

  Cristina closed the curtains and refreshed the cold rag for her forehead. Afriqua Lee wanted to tell her there wasn’t much time, the Jaguar found his way inside, his reach spanned two worlds and his spies were everywhere. She didn’t have the strength.

  Besides, where could they hide when their very dreams betrayed them?

  “The Roam is moving,” Cristina said. “The stench of Jaguar droppings fills the wind, closer by the hour.”

  Afriqua Lee heard the bustlings outside, the rattle of rigging and the cough of old engines coaxed out of their winter sleep.

  “We are among the last,” Cristina said. “The rest left last night for the highlands, the seacoast, the sand reaches of the Quetzal. Your Rafferty humiliated a priest and now we are paying for it.”

  “The Jaguar . . . we have glimpsed his tail through the curtain.”

  “While you pinched the tail the paw struck down the Roam. The Jaguar priesthood has put a bounty out on every branded hand delivered to them, alive or dead, attached or not.”

  Afriqua sucked in a sharp breath and let it out slowly to ease the pounding in her head.

  “But why . . . ?”

  “To shame us into turning the two of you over to them.”