The Skinwalker's Tale

by Christopher Carrolli

  “She’s out there,” he said with a sideways nod of his head. “I killed her.”

  He heard the slight distress in his own voice, the sound of unexpected grief. He felt his eyes narrowing in uncertainty, fighting back tears for her that had no place, tears over the incredible mess that his life had become. He felt himself wishing that he’d never explored this secret about himself. Now, he wished that he’d left it the hell alone.

  Susan lowered her head, as did the others. The spoken truth was the confirmation they’d all been waiting for, but still, the sound of it was strong and final like a gong.

  “She was waiting for me when I got back,” he said. He told them how he’d come out onto the patio, and there she was, picking up broken pieces of one of the glass candle shades.

  “You were right all along, Susan,” he said, his voice shaking. “It was her, not Antonio.” Susan grabbed him and hugged him, and the next thing he knew, he was walking with her to the patio. Dylan, Sidney, and Tahoe were looking off into the woods, but within moments, they all were seated around him on the patio.

  He told them everything: how they’d sat together out here, and she revealed the story of her life, how she kept the secret from Uncle Jack and Aunt Vivian, how her mental illness had only been a piece of a much larger puzzle, and why she felt she had to leave.

  “I’m so sorry, Brett,” Susan said. “All of it must have been difficult to hear.”

  “She’d been watching me for years,” he said. “In fact, she began stalking me after finding out about Herb Haller. She was watching and listening to us out here after the funeral. She was in wolf form. She heard everything.”

  “So, she knew that you were hunting your parental skinwalker,” Tahoe said, almost guessing. “She knew that you wanted to put the legend to the test.”

  Susan gasped in disbelief.

  “So, it was either you or her?”

  He nodded, watching their amazement. Susan’s mouth was agape, Leah dropped her head in disbelief, and Sidney just stared. Dylan was looking once more out into the woods.

  “Then, she told me something,” Brett said. “She’d killed Antonio.”

  Now, the disbelief spread into audible shock. He told them the story of how Claudia had shifted into the fly and killed Antonio.

  “She’d followed us to Appleton,” he said. “Remember the fly in Andre’s house?”

  “She’d been with us the whole time,” Susan said; her jaw still dropped.

  “She told me that the first person she’d killed was a man with whom she was involved. He was the one who wrote the anonymous note that Uncle Jack told us about. He became a threat to her, and so she killed him. I sat here and saw the insanity in her eyes. God, how I even heard it in her voice!

  “And then when she told me that she’d killed my father...Antonio...I couldn’t hold it back anymore. I felt myself changing; I couldn’t stop it. She was shifting also, but not fast enough. I shifted into the wolf, and like the night at Herb Haller’s, I attacked her. But this time was different. I killed, knowingly and willingly.”

  He told them of his earlier thoughts, those he’d been having when he heard the van pulling up. He related exactly how the shifting had been different this time around. He couldn’t explain it, but unlike before, he’d been conscious of everything, the very consciousness that Claudia described. It was if she’d passed it on to him, simply by revealing herself.

  “She explained to me that at some point in my life, I would be fully conscious during a shifting. And so it happened. I was completely aware of everything as I killed her.”

  “Does this mean that you drank the blood of the skinwalker?” Tahoe asked.

  Brett’s pause was long and lost in thought.

  “I did,” he said.

  The silence was a long one, and eyes shot back and forth at each other in its duration.

  Dylan came and sat alongside him. Their eyes stared straight and forward into the woods.

  “Come on,” he said; his voice was dark and direct. “We’ve got a hole to finish digging.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The hole that Brett had begun to dig hadn’t been deep, less than a foot. He’d abruptly gone back to the shed after remembering the blood in the grass. Now, after taking another shovel and the spade from the shed, he, Dylan, and Sidney began digging a hole that soon became larger and deeper. He and Dylan did most of the digging, while Sidney moved the dirt into a pile with the spade. The sweat was drenching the three of them even beneath the shade of the thick forested trees.

  The body was exactly where he’d left it, though this time Susan had insisted that the body be wrapped in a sheet. She’d taken one from Aunt Viv’s old linen closet, and the three of them wrapped Claudia’s body up in it. Blood red had seeped and stained white cotton within seconds. Now, nearly two hours had passed as Dylan called out from the bottom of the hole.

  “What do you think, Sid...six-feet?”

  Sidney eyed the edge of the rectangular hole that seemed even with the top of Dylan’s six-foot stance.

  “It’s six-feet, easily,” he said.

  Dylan then grabbed onto Sidney’s hand and climbed up out the hole, and Brett followed. The three of them stood panting and looking down inside of it. Dylan turned to Brett and spoke between breaths.

  “Well, let’s get this over with,” he said.

  Brett lifted one end of the crudely mummified remains, and Dylan took the other. They gently laid the body alongside the edge of the hole and then rolled it down inside. They shoveled piles of dirt into the hole, and what had taken them nearly two hours now took only fifteen minutes. They patted down the dirt that made the hidden grave, here in the woods adjacent to Brett Taylor’s farm. When the dirty deed was done, the three of them walked back to the patio, where Susan, Tahoe, and Leah were waiting.

  * * * *

  Brett, Dylan, and Sidney cleaned up quickly in the bathroom and then made it back down to the patio, where they all sat discussing the turn of events.

  “So, I guess that’s it,” Brett said, as they all stared at him.

  “How do you feel, Brett?” Susan asked.

  “Like a murderer waiting to discover whether or not I’ll be given the oddest of reprieves. I feel like one secret has led to another.”

  “I’m afraid that is the outcome, Brett,” she said. “It’s the way it has to be, unfortunately. We are all complicit in what’s happened here, but it was a matter of self-defense. Had you found Antonio, the circumstances would’ve been entirely different. You would’ve been the aggressor.”

  “Are you all certain that no one is going to find her?” Leah asked. She’d been worried about this day coming back to haunt Brett later in the future.

  “No one’s going to find her, Leah,” Brett said. “This is my property now. Those woods are my land, and there’s no hunting allowed on my property—ever. There’s no other reason for anyone to be in those woods; if they are, they’re trespassing.

  “Claudia was a murderer,” he continued. “She killed someone before she killed Antonio. She had no one, no living relatives other than me. No one will ever miss her; no one will ever find her.”

  “And you need to keep telling yourself that every time you feel guilty,” Susan said, “though guilt is natural.”

  “You didn’t kill her,” Sidney said. “You executed her.”

  “There is a certain truth to that,” Susan said, “even if the logic is a little unorthodox.”

  “What I want to know is how do you feel, physically?” Tahoe moved in closer to him and spoke softly. “And what do you feel inside your soul?”

  Brett reiterated what he tried to express to them before. In all of the confusion, he hadn’t really had a moment to feel.

  “I feel different than I ever have before,” he said. “I feel normal. I feel the world around me from a different standpoint. I feel like a regular within it, and not so much of an abstraction. But somewhere inside of me, it’s still there. I am sti
ll a shifter, but not like before. It’s like I’m in control of it, not the other way around. I’ve become whole.”

  “Do you still feel the chaos?” Tahoe spoke while listening to Brett’s every word, studying him, hoping to learn.

  Brett narrowed his eyes in thought, searching, feeling inside himself.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. I feel like I’ve overcome the chaos or maybe surpassed it.”

  “Tahoe what are your thoughts on that?” Susan asked.

  “It is likely that you are still a shape-shifter, Brett,” Tahoe answered. “But the degree of it may have lessened, or you may have become one with it. In either case, you have overcome it, but to what extent, only time will tell. It may no longer be a curse to you.”

  “I don’t feel like it is,” he said. “I feel free from its dominance, but I feel like it’s something I can call upon if needed, much like I did when I first searched for you.”

  Tahoe smiled at him.

  “You were then beginning to understand what could be done,” he said. “But you had no way to control it. It began to control you. It seems that you may’ve won, my young friend.”

  Despite the night’s strange and tragic event, there was a slight sense of optimism in the air around them, and they basked in it silently. Tahoe turned to Brett and answered a question of which he’d been wondering, but hadn’t asked.

  “I began having visions on the way back,” he said. “The visions showed me a wolf’s paw prints leading right back here, though you had flown away as the hawk. I’d seen it as a sign that another shifter had been stalking you. Then, as I saw the black wolf covered in blood, Leah had seen the face of a woman.”

  “And then Vivian spoke to me,” Sidney said. “She’d said two important words, ‘It’s over.’ That’s how we knew.”

  “And that’s the way you must continue to think of it,” Susan said. “That it’s over. Those words meant and referred to so much more than the incident that took place here. It’s the end of the old life for you, Brett. It’s the start of a new one, one of which you are in complete control. And one thing you must always remember—you must never again mention Claudia Taylor.”

  “That’s right,” Dylan said. “You never met her.”

  “And it must remain that way,” Susan said. “In your mind and in your heart, you will always know that this day occurred. But to the rest of the world, Claudia left when you were only a baby, and she was never seen or heard from again. The same goes for Antonio. All that you know is what Andre Anakas had told you.”

  Brett looked at Leah who was smiling at him.

  “More secrets,” she said.

  “Secrets that are essential,” Susan said.

  “Secrets that cover our asses,” Sidney said.

  They laughed lightly.

  “No one would believe the truth anyway,” Susan said. “We must remember who we are. And so, we’ve reached the end of another case. I’m sure that we’d all been hoping for a lighter and merrier conclusion, but it’s not like we had a list of options from which to choose. It’s the conclusion we’ve been dealt, and we’ll live with it. After all, we are dealing with the unknown.

  “Brett, you’ve now learned the truth about your parents. You’ve filled in the missing pieces that have stumped you for your entire life. A weight has been lifted from your shoulders. I’ve also heard from my sources at the hospital, while you all were in the woods. They say that Mr. Haller is recovering quite readily and has been moved to his own room. He’ll need some surgeries, but he has survived this.”

  She was right again. He felt a ton of weight being lifted from his shoulders.

  “And yes, there is one more thing,” she continued. “We finally get to see the handsome face you’ve hidden from us.”

  She hugged him hard, and he felt safe with her, with them all. She pulled away.

  “But now, it’s getting late,” she said, motioning to the sky that began to darken into dusk. “It’s been an extraordinarily long weekend. You need to rest, tonight and into tomorrow. I want you to call me first thing in the morning.”

  He agreed, and she made one final suggestion.

  “I want you to keep a journal from this moment forward,” she said. “And of course, there is to be no mention of Claudia, Antonio, or anything that’s happened here. If and when the shifting occurs, I want you to record everything. We’ll discuss it in our sessions.”

  He nodded his consent.

  “Now, I think it’s time we take our leave,” she said.

  One by one, they hugged him, expressing relief.

  “Like she said, get some rest,” Dylan said. “We’ll need you for our next case.”

  “If you need me, call me,” Leah said.

  “What she said,” Sidney said, hugging him.

  “Thank you all for everything,” Brett said. “Thank you for being here when I needed you the most. I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through this without you all.”

  “What else are friends for?” Sidney said.

  Brett walked them to the front and watched as the investigators piled into Sidney’s van and drove away. He walked back to the patio, where Tahoe was waiting for him. The old seer broke the silence as he sat in the oncoming darkness, his face an eerie semblance above the flickering light from a candle shade.

  “So, the skinwalker’s tale has been told, my friend,” he said. “Now, it is time for a new beginning.”

  * * * *

  Tahoe watched him as he’d strolled back to the patio. He seemed calm, rational, not erratic and nervous as he had been for some time. So, the legend turned out to be true, but from a certain standpoint. Tahoe surmised that the end result he’d witnessed meant that this strange ability would no longer be a curse to the beholder. Brett would no longer live his life in confusion, sharing his soul with myriad shapes and shifting like an ever changing chameleon. He’d been freed of its dominance.

  Now, Brett would live his life, mirroring an age-old description of a shape-shifter. He would be akin to a witch, a conjurer in the sense that he would be able to turn it on and off at the command of his will. Tahoe could always see the sign of it stamped on his face, alive in his eyes like the soul itself. It was still there; it always would be. Surely, the wolf would run again, and the hawk would fly high in the sky as before. But all things would be one between Brett and the animal, as though two beings combined into one supernatural union.

  No longer would his soul be split in two. He’d been released from the chaos; his soul was his own, the soul of Brett Taylor. Tahoe spoke of it being time for a new beginning, and now his young friend sat next to him on the picnic bench.

  “I know,” he said. “I have to keep this place alive for Uncle Jack and Aunt Viv. This was their home.

  “Now, it’s yours, all of it,” Tahoe said.

  “How do I ever thank you?”

  “The best way to thank me is to put this all behind you, rise above it, and live.”

  Tahoe noticed Brett’s sad and somber expression that had remained.

  “It will take time for the pain to disappear, the guilt to wash away, but you’ve done justice to yourself today, my friend. Never forget it. Live your life. There is nothing for which you need absolved. There is no curse.”

  Tahoe watched as a tear rolled down Brett’s cheek. The two of them sat together in the deadness of a peaceful sundown, silent except for the screeching crickets. Tahoe would watch over him for a few days and then fly home to the Arizona desert. He felt the positive vibes of hope inside of him, assuring him that Brett would be fine. He would not only overcome, but prosper.

  Soon, the need for sleep hit his aging body hard, and he fought to keep his eyelids open. They’d talked for what seemed like hours, but now Tahoe would leave him to retire.

  “Are you sure you won’t come inside?” Tahoe said. “The day is over, my friend. Nothing more can be done.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just want a few moments alone.”

  Tah
oe left him on the patio, lost in thought and gazing up at the brilliant network of stars.

  * * * *

  Only moments ago, he’d shed silent tears, tears for Uncle Jack, Aunt Vivian, and even a few for Claudia and Antonio. He looked out at the open land before him, remembering the good times he’d shared with his aunt and uncle, his childhood memories, his adolescent days of apathy, his adult years caring for Uncle Jack. All of it was gone and the land was now mere empty space under the darkness of nightfall, but in his mind, old memories thrived and replayed in a well-remembered sunshine.

  Change had come about him, and this time it came in a different way. This change had set the scene for a new, unwritten chapter in his life. A whole new backdrop had been placed behind him, a backdrop much like the network of stars above him that would ultimately change as well. He realized that change was inevitable; it was the one thing that was constant and ongoing. Change meant that you were in the land of the living.

  Silent tears fell away, and now he felt only the overwhelming calmness he’d experienced earlier. But it was more than just calm. For the first time in months, he felt peace and tranquility. For the first time in years, he no longer felt preoccupied by some second side of himself. The urge to break free and run wild as his body endured a stressful metamorphosis had long left him, along with the taste of Claudia’s blood.

  Now, he felt only a peaceful numbness settling deep inside as he stared up at Orion’s belt. He was still a shifter. It would always be a part of him; he felt it in his soul. But the soul of Brett Taylor felt something else, something much greater—release.

  THE END

  The Paranormal Investigator will continue.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to take this space to thank Melange Publisher, Nancy Schumacher, for all of her endless dedication and attention to my books. And to Caroline Andrus, whose incredible talent is responsible for my covers. I would also like to thank Melange Author, Jaden Sinclair, for suggesting that I make the shape-shifter my own, and to go as far as I wanted to go. Hopefully, I’ve done that.