Maybe Uncle Steven, I thought. Mom’s brother. He lived on the other side of the county, in a cabin on the side of Cheaha Mountain.
Nah. He was seventy-nine. Not a good age to be slinging cadavers around.
I looked down at Mom’s body. Then to the floor beneath her—
What was that?
Underneath the dirt of the pen floor. Something that had recently conducted magical power. I could feel it.
I scraped out a furrow of dirt. There. Underneath. A layer of blue-green mineral mixed with the brown soil. Also specks of pure black in the soil that sparkled like obsidian. I continued to scrape, followed the unusual mineral. It was forming a rough circle around my mother’s body. I didn’t complete the tracing, but knelt down, picked up a pinch of the substance and sniffed it. A burnt, chemical smell. Not organic. I dug up more of it with my fingers until a substantial section of the stuff was exposed.
Then I water-witched it. The sensation is a bit like taste, and a bit like getting a mild, but uncomfortable electrical shock. After years of practice, I could witch any rock or soil and know pretty much what it was made of, based on the water content, or lack thereof. This was part of my job searching for oil and natural gas. I was good at it.
The powder had a dryness I recognized from a thousand other witchings.
Some kind of salt. But not sodium chloride. The blue-green gave it away. A copper salt. There were many different copper salts, however.
It had burned. That was what the black specks were.
I left the pen, went to the edge of the exercise yard.
“What did you see?” I asked the pit bulls. “When she died, did you see fire?”
Yes. Flames. Shooting from the ground. Rising high.
We ran.
We were afraid.
We were too afraid to guard her.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Can you tell me what color the flames were?”
Contrary to what many think, dogs are not colorblind, but the range of the spectrum they see is limited. In addition to black and white, they can pick out blues, yellows, and violets.
Blue.
No, purple.
Blue!
Purple!
Blue!
A snarling, nipping fight erupted momentarily, but died down quickly. I walked away. I’d heard enough.
Blue to purple. Copper chloride. It was the copper salt residue that was left after the most powerful manifestations of magical power.
Particularly from the dark side of the craft.
Even now when walking through the woods of northern Alabama, you can stumble upon deep pits in the ground sinking down to blackness. These are pits that look dug, not like sink holes. More than a few hunters had slipped into such pits and fallen to their deaths.
In this region, these pits were usually known to the locals as “old copper mines,” or “test pits.” Sometimes they were known by their true name.
Devil holes.
So I’d found burnt copper salt under my mother’s body. I went back and scraped away more dirt. The black-and-blue-tinged soil formed a large circle, about six feet in diameter. Mom’s body was lying in the center of it.
Magic. Black magic.
Which meant someone—or something—had killed her.
I had to get out of here. I needed to leave and get my head straight.
Murder.
Someone had killed my mom.
I started to leave, but then the howls began.
Hungry! Hungry!
Feed us!
Eat my own shit, I did. Not good. Not good at all.
Dig, dig, dig, but there’s no way out. Can smell the food.
So close, but we can’t get it!
Hungry!
Feed us or we’ll eat you!
We’ll tear you limb from limb!
Let us out!
Please, let us out!
Please. She is gone!
She’s gone!
The mother is gone.
Uncle Steven. He may not be much help lifting bodies, but he would be the one to ask about this.
He was a wizard, after all. Although we called him a “cunning man” in these parts.
“I left her there. I couldn’t bring myself to move her,” I said, shaking my head.
“I understand. What did you do then?” my uncle asked.
“Fed the dogs. She would have wanted me to.”
“Ah, of course. They must have been very hungry.”
“All except the ones who had chowed down on Mom.”
Uncle Steven nodded solemnly. “Of course. Not them.”
I paced around his cabin porch, setting off creaks and groans in the old wood planks.
“This is beyond me, Uncle Steven. I need your help.”
Uncle Steven leaned back in the old rocker that sat on the front porch of his cabin—and had for as long as I could remember. Mom had told me once that her grandfather had made the chair with wood from one of the last groves of American chestnuts that survived the blight.
“And what do you expect me to do, Phillip?” my uncle asked. “If something was powerful enough to kill Maude, do you think I’d stand a chance against . . . whatever it is.”
“But you’re the most skilled cunning man I ever knew or ever heard of.”
“I’m a shadow of those who used to be, Phil.” Uncle Steven gazed out from the porch over the rolling hills below him. The cabin was built just below the state park boundary. It sat on a rocky promontory on the south side of Cheaha Mountain, which was the highest point in the state. The cabin had been constructed of old power poles. I never found out why, precisely. There was a creosote tang to the air around and within it that never went away. I remembered from my youth that it hung on Uncle Steven’s clothing, as well.
I had once asked Mom about that. “Why does Uncle Steven smell like telephone poles?”
She’d laughed and shook her head. “He claims it is proof against a certain kind of haint. Something he says he ran into in Vietnam.”
Those had been the halcyon days, if I’d only known it. A time when Mom paid more attention to me than to her dogs. Kids think that stuff will never end. Maybe adults do, too. And sometimes, after the kids are gone off to live their life, there’s a void left, a place for mothering and caring that no longer has any object.
I’d always supposed this was Mom’s reason for turning to the dogs. It was substitute for Gretchen and Tom. It was a substitute for me, the youngest, the one who would always be the baby. Baby brother to them. And to Mom?
Oh, my baby. My sweetie pie. Tell Mommy what’s the matter.
You fucking left me for a pack of dogs! Now you’re gone forever! That’s what’s the matter.
But maybe I flattered myself in thinking that she missed me at all. Maybe I was merely the final responsibility she had to discharge before she could get to her true love, saving animals.
I turned my attention back to Uncle Steven.
“There are stories of the old cunning men who could move whole mountains if they took a notion. Some could bring down stars.”
“That sounds . . . farfetched,” I said.
“Because you see with your eyes in one world, Phil. But you and I, we walk in another,” Uncle Steven replied.
“And where the two worlds touch—that’s what makes the ley lines,” I said. “I’ve heard this lecture before. From you.”
“I always said you have the makings of a ley scribe. Far better than I ever was.”
“I’m a water-witch,” I replied, almost resentfully. “That’s good enough.”
How dare he make me feel guilty for choosing the world of ordinary human activity over a life waving around a dowsing rod and spending my time casting spells with backward mountain magic?
“That’s as far as I’ll ever get with the craft. You want to spend your time mapping out a bunch of imaginary magical lines, go ahead. I’d rather spend my time productively.”
I glanced at Uncle Steven quickly
to see if I’d offended him. This was how he made his living. Farmers, construction contractors, real estate developers, even the occasional architect who’d heard of him, would employ Uncle Steven to check their land and orient prospective buildings for the best alignment with the spirit world. Sometimes they paid him to scribe a new ley line through an existing structure that had “a bad feel to it” or was reported to be haunted—usually a sign of a bad land-ley.
The ability to actually etch a new line of power into the land itself was very rare—and highly sought-after by those who could sense the old magic at work in the world, even if they didn’t understand quite what it was they were experiencing.
My uncle, as always, seemed completely unperturbed by my dismissive swipe at his profession. He gazed at me for a moment with that ancient gaze of his—the gaze I remembered so well from my childhood—that said he was looking right through my defenses and into my soul. “You know, Phil, after I came back from Vietnam, I wanted nothing to do with the craft. I’d visited a screaming land. I’d seen too many disastrous, tangled leys and twisted spirits of the earth. My mind was bent in a way I thought I could never fix. I just wanted to hide from the bad effects knocking around in here.” He tapped his knuckles against a temple. “But sometimes we don’t get to make our own choices,” he said. “Sometimes the talent chooses for us.”
“I just want to figure out what to do about Mom.”
“What do you mean ‘do about’ her?”
“I want to find out who or what killed her, and I want to destroy it,” I said. The conviction came so suddenly into my voice, my mind, that it startled me. “I have been coming out here at least once a month for twenty years. I’ve brought her groceries, watched hours of God-awful Law and Orders and NCISes with her—and I’ve taken care of them—and those pens—when she had to go to the doctor, or to visit that herb crafter she was friends with, or just get out for some reason.” I was trembling. I wiped my eyes.
Cry later, I thought.
“Whoever did this took my family from me. I want them to pay.”
Uncle Steven nodded. “Good. Know thyself. Even if the truth is ugly.” He rocked for a moment in the chestnut rocking chair, then continued. “To trace the source of a power, follow the lines,” he said. “There are dark places in the land where evilness and mayhem concentrate. It can be a mindless reservoir. It can also be a person. Or a devil.”
“Jesus, Uncle Steven,” I said. “A devil? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“A spirit of the land that’s gone bad, then,” he replied. “Some are stronger than others.” My uncle leaned forward. The rocking chair runners creaked against the porch. “It takes a scribe to draw a ley line. It takes a sandman to move earth, it takes a cunning man or a witch to set a spell on it and make a trigger.”
“Are you saying some demonic power killed Mom? Why, for god’s sake? She was just a crazy, old dog lady.” I stared at Uncle Steven for a moment. “And why are you taking this with such an even-temper?”
“I’m not. But I’ve already made my peace with it.”
I didn’t know how he could have. I’d only been here a little over an hour. Then it hit me.
“You scried this, didn’t you? You knew about it already.”
Uncle Steven nodded. He smiled one of his bleak smiles—the slightly amused, slightly appalled look on his face that seemed to indicate he was gazing across possibilities, between the natural and the supernatural, and didn’t necessarily like what he saw there. “You don’t know much about your mother, do you?” he said. “About her task in life? I don’t blame you, of course. She wanted it that way.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know if I even care at this point,” I said. “And as far as evil beings go, maybe it was some devil that was tormenting her all these years, causing her to keep seventy-seven dogs! Maybe that’s what finally killed her.”
“You’re closer than you realize,” Uncle Steven said.
“Why don’t you explain what you’re talking about, Uncle Steven.”
My uncle considered me for a moment. He had a stare that could strip paint. “I guess I’d better come with you.”
“Come with me where?”
“To the scene of the crime,” he said. “Let’s go and avenge my sister.”
He stood up slowly, careful not to leave the rocker rocking. To let it do so was a wide-open invitation to haints.
We took my car and returned to the dog barn. The structure sat in the middle of eighty acres of woodland. My mom had picked it for their “retirement.” My dad had built the barn within an oak grove located about a quarter mile down the private drive he’d scraped out with the little Kubota tractor that he’d loved. He’d bought the Kubota before dog upkeep had eaten away all my parents’ savings.
We got out, scattering the cat carpet before us as if we were walking through a field of flowers. Meowing, hungry flowers. For a moment, I thought Uncle Steven wasn’t going to go in. He suddenly leaned over as if he’d been punched in the gut, turned around, and put his hands on the hood of my car. I thought at first he was gasping for air, but then I realized he was sobbing.
For the first time in my life, my uncle looked old to me. Worn. A flint that had been struck too often.
After a moment, he took a deep breath and straightened up.
“I’m all right,” he said, responding to my tacit question. “Let’s go in.”
Mom had taught me how to recognize ley lines—in fact, I considered myself pretty good at it—but I’d only used the craft for dowsing for oil and gas, doodle-bugging for minerals, and water-witching. My family knew craft, although only Gretchen and I had major talents. Dad had zilch, and Tom could barely charm a lightning bug.
It didn’t seem odd growing up with this thing that few knew about, and even fewer believed in. It wasn’t a secret, but we didn’t talk about it at school or church or the Quintard Mall food court in my home town of Anniston because . . . well, we just knew not to. It was a family matter.
Until the family broke apart. Death. Parenthood.
Dogs.
“So tell me,” I said. “Mom’s task.”
“Her instinct was to protect you from it,” Uncle Steven replied. “Maybe that was a good instinct.”
The barn door was chain-link fence stapled to a wooden gate frame. It slapped closed behind us after we entered, drawn by its bungee cord closing mechanism. Dad had rigged this up, probably as a temporary measure for closing the barn door behind you after you came in, but it was still working twenty years later.
Uncle Steven sniffed the rank, doggy air, sneezed.
“Christ, it stinks in here!” he said.
“Stay a while and you’ll be smelling it for days, no matter how many showers you take.”
“I haven’t been in this place for years. We always sit outside when I visit. Now I understand why.”
We walked down the center aisle of the barn. The structure was large. It was about forty feet across and a hundred feet deep. It had no foundation. My father had built it of pole construction. He’d set the uprights using a special rig he’d made that fitted into the bed of his pickup truck—the red truck that Mom had never sold, that had sat outside on the edge of the parking area rusting for two decades.
Sometimes she used the truck as a pen for keeping dogs that had to be temporarily separated from the others, or that hadn’t yet been assigned a pen. The pole-setting rig itself had long ago rotted away in the nearby woods, although its connecting bolts still lay on the ground under a layer of mulch and oak leaves if you knew where to look for them.
I slowed before we got to the pen where Mom’s body lay. I let myself spread. I could tell Uncle Steven was doing the same. Maybe we could quiet the damn dogs, at least enough to allow us to think.
“Can you please calm down?” I told the barn at large.
Feed us! Feed us!
Hungry! Feed us, feed us!
“I already did.”
Again! We’re hungry.
“Dogs,” said Uncle Steven, shaking his head. “The only things more predictable are cats and jaybirds.”
The barking did die down a bit, though. We arrived at the pen where the body was.
My uncle hesitated, and then looked inside.
“Oh,” he said softly. He stared at her for a moment. “We were the closest growing up. Played together all the time,” he finally said. “Your mother could talk to anything, you know. Birds. Squirrels. Even trees, occasionally. The more lively ones like sweetgums, I mean.” He moved into the pen entrance, stood there without fully entering. “One time we were down by Choccolocco Creek at that swing we had. I was messing around in an old boat we had found washed ashore on a sand bar, and she was up on the wooden platform Bobby built out of lumber from the old barn.” Bobby was one of their six older brothers, dead for several years now. “The platform was supposed to be for swinging off of, but Maude liked to sit there and look at the creek.”
I almost put a hand on his shoulder, but drew back. He didn’t need comforting. All he really needed was to talk.
“I paddled under a tree limb, and a snake plopped right out of the branches and into the floor of the boat. It was a water moccasin. A big one.”
My uncle shook his head. “I thought I was a goner. They are territorial, you know. One of the only snakes that’ll attack you right out. I scrambled toward the back of the boat and that big old thing was coming after me. Fast. Then I heard her shout.”
Steven shook his head, seemingly still amazed after all these decades.
“That cottonmouth stopped right in his tracks. Didn’t move another muscle. I could hear it cursing up a storm, too. ‘Let me go, damn it all! Let me bite! Damned trespasser. This is my creek!’ That sort of stuff. Yep, it wanted to get at me, and it couldn’t because something was holding it. That something was Maude’s talent. She probably saved my life. I knew it then and I know it now.”
He nodded. “That was the day I realized she was more than a craft-talker. She was a major talent. She was a maker like none that have been born for many years. She could spread herself out into the world. She could cause animals to obey her, not merely listen. Trees and flowers, too. Maybe even the land itself.”
Onward, Drake! Page 11