Well, apparently Holly had it, too, because a laugh exploded out of her along with about a gallon of snot. Looking down at my goobered shirt just made it even funnier. The two of us started to build up to rollicking guffaws when my dad’s hand left my shoulder, and he said, “Helen? Wait, come back.”
That flipped the breaker right back, and suddenly, nothing was funny as I watched him follow my mom down the hall. I looked back at Holly and saw her face—white with terror.
“Is she going to send me back?”
My already-torn heart just flipped over, tits-up, and died. I put my hands on either side of her face and tried to keep my voice steady. “No Holly, no! She would never do that! You’re here forever. She’s not mad at you. She’s mad at... everything.” That hit the nail right on the head. With everything that had happened to us, she had never once lost it. She had been as strong and as steady as a rock, and she didn’t even have a dryad to help her.
I tried to explain it to Holly. “Sometimes, people just get upset or angry. She... she loves us very much, and the thought of what happened to us can be overwhelming. She’ll be okay, just you wait and see. She’ll be okay.” I hoped, I really hoped.
That was smooth, dude. Way to avoid telling them the whole truth.
They don’t need to know the whole truth. It would crush them.
Maybe your mom, but your dad has been cool as a pickle about everything lately.
That’s cucumber, and I’m glad someone is.
I got Holly up and off my lap and spent a little time getting us both cleaned up. My dad came back into the kitchen looking grave. He said, “Finn, she’s pretty upset right now. Go do what you have to do. I’ll stay here with your mother and sister and we’ll wait for you to get back. Then we’ll have a family talk.”
I painfully tried swallow the dryness from my mouth and nodded. At that moment, I was more afraid of that talk than I was of the shadow I was going to go confront.
Shadow Scraper
Standing at the foot of Mr. Johnson’s bed, listening to his labored breathing, and looking at the darkness, which now completely covered his aura, I reconsidered the whole fear thing. At that moment, I would have given anything to be having a knockdown drag-out with my parents.
I regularly run out of adjectives to describe what these monsters feel like to me. They’re singularly nasty. Imagine reaching into an ice-cold bucket of wet leaches—active, hungry, rotting leeches. Now imagine pulling out a double handful of the slimy, squirmy bloodsuckers, and watch as they latch onto you for dinner. I’d rather do that than touch a shadow with my mind.
Well..., on second thought, maybe not. But still, yeeech!
Worst thing ever or not, I couldn’t do it, and I turned to leave, but Dr. Anderson stood between me and the door, blue eyes blazing.
I shook my head unsteadily and shivered. “I can’t, Doc, I can’t do it.”
His laser beam stare splashed harmlessly off my shield of fear and shame. “Finn, you have to do it. No one else can.”
“But you don’t know what it’s like! You don’t know how it feels to touch them with your mind!”
He didn’t blink or move. “It’s true I can’t see it like you can, but I think you know that I do understand what it feels like.”
Oh yeah. I’d dumped a fairly nasty one on him for a couple of days. He knew something about it, all right, but that shadow was a baby compared to Wendigota and his didn’t have the power of my Caduceus to help it. Wendigota had blindsided me, and then it had used the Caduceus to swat me like an annoying fly.
Anderson couldn’t know what it was like being flooded with that cold, pitiless hunger and malevolence. After I’d been taken, I’d still been me. I could remember every second of that nightmare along with every last feeling I had. The fact that I had enjoyed it was the worst. My body still reacted to the glorious rush of feeding off of someone’s soul and a sick part of me still yearned to feel it again...
When I realized the path my mind had taken, I nearly vomited.
“I know this is unpleasant, Finn, but it has to be done. You know that, right? We can’t just sit by and let this shadow destroy Mr. Johnson.”
Yes, said Spring.
No.
Crap. I nodded miserably and girded my mental loins once more to turn around and do what needed to be done. Before I could even turn, I was engulfed in icy raw sewage. The slime filled my mind bringing pitiless cold and endless hunger. The shadow connected and started to feed.
I screamed and panicked. With everything I had, I shattered my attacker with everything I could pull through the Caduceus. The shadow barely had time to react. In an instant, the dark, suffocating hunger shredded around me as I blew it apart. Bits of it flew away in all directions. Frantic not to be reinfected, I solidified the blast into my golden shield—the shield that I believed came from a piece of my soul.
I looked out through my shield to see if I could track where the gobbets of darkness had landed, but instead of flying away as I thought they would, they still covered my shield. Apparently, whatever stuff these things were made of, inertia wasn’t part of it.
In an instant, I inverted my shield, surrounded, and compressed the blackness in a golden barrier of my will augmented with power from my Caduceus. After the intimate, invasive feel of its touch a moment before, I could barely feel the squirming black mass contained in my shield.
The after-effects of the adrenalin rush I’d just received made my legs start to quiver and it became difficult to focus. I’d overdone it. My golden sphere began sprouting black tentacles. I felt the shadow pushing through cracks in my control, and I couldn’t stop it, so I put it the only place I knew it would stay—on Dr. Anderson.
As soon my shield touched Anderson, the black tendrils flowed onto his aura and quickly coated it. The doctor stiffened and staggered momentarily but regained his control quickly. He’d done this before.
I collapsed onto the floor and sat on my butt, as a wave of dizziness hit me. When it had passed, and I could pay attention to outside events again, Anderson was over by the bed, checking on Mr. Johnson. The familiar utter stillness of his body told me Mr. Johnson was dead. Of course, I knew before even looking. That’s the only way a shadow could free itself from a host—at least as far as I knew. On top of that, the unmistakable smell of death filled the air.
The hooded man with the scythe seemed to be stalking me these days. I took another shuddering breath. I wanted to crawl into a hole as the seeds of guilt began to sprout, but my exhaustion prevented them from blossoming, and I was too tired to crawl.
“Sorry, Doc.”
He stood up, turned, and looked at me. I thought I detected some small indications of the strain on his face when he said, “Can you walk? I’d like to get this thing off me and onto our cow.”
The man was a machine. I’d never seen anyone with that level of self-control. I hadn’t considered where I would park the blackness I could now see swirling violently around his white aura, but he’d been the right choice.
On the plus side, he didn’t have the Caduceus. That made the shadow a lot less dangerous on him than it was on me. Somehow, Bertha had used it to completely overpower me...
Oh, shit! My adrenals made one final pathetic squirt in reaction to a new fear. I drove my awareness to the cage within me where I kept Wendigota imprisoned. I didn’t know what I would do if it had escaped while I was fighting the other shadow. The cage was still there, intact. A cord of power still ran from the Caduceus to the cage’s golden bands and I could feel the dark, cold, hunger within.
I fell back onto the floor in relief and exhaustion and lay there.
Spring’s cross voice drifted into my thoughts. Say “thank you, Spring.”
Thank you, Spring.
I made sure the cage didn’t falter. Finn, are you sure we have to screw with this bogus crap?
I really wish we didn’t, Spring.
When I opened my eyes, Anderson stood in the same place pinning me with
his blue-eyed regard.
I flopped my hand at Anderson. “Just give me a minute, Doc.”
***
After I scraped the shadow off of the doc and attached it to a hapless cow, I chowed on several power bars and a full lunch to try and stop my shaking. I was partially successful, and I headed home rehearsing what I was going to tell my parents.
Once home, I told them almost everything. I told them what I’d been doing with Dr. Anderson and his patients. I told them about Wendigota, stripping it off of Erik, it's origins and the cage I kept it in.
I didn't tell them the truth about Daniel’s death, or my theory that auras were souls, or that I had given several pieces of mine away to help fix Holly, Daniel (before I killed him), and Erik. I had no idea what the long-term repercussions of losing parts of myself would be, and I didn’t want my mother worrying about something she had no control over.
It took quite a while and lot of questions, protests and exclamations, but, in the end, my dad took it more calmly than I would have thought possible. My mom looked horrified.
She shuddered when I finished and then laid down the law. “You’re never going back there again, Finn.”
Good call, Mom!
I ignored Spring, swallowed my fear of confrontation, and said the hardest four words of my life. “Yes, Mom, I am.”
“No you’re not! I won’t allow you to be part of this anymore. Anderson is criminally negligent and should be thrown in jail! We don’t know what these things are, Finn. We don’t know what contact with them will do to you. You’re not going to be that madman’s guinea pig any longer.”
“Mom, please. This is something I have to do.”
“No! As long as you’re under this roof, you’ll stay away from that man and these things.”
I thrust out my jaw belligerently. “Then I’ll have to leave. I’m 18 years old and you can’t stop me.”
She froze solid. I had crossed a line and broken something, some bond of trust. It made my stomach churn and my head ache just to think about it, but the damage was done.
My mom clenched her jaws and fled up the stairs. I turned to my dad with wide, stunned eyes. His thinner and more severe face held nothing but compassion.
“Finn, I’ll talk to her. We just have to give her some time. It’s hard enough when your child grows up, but the shocks she’s received over the last few months have rocked her world.”
“What about you, Dad? What do you think?”
He pulled off his Harry Potter glasses and polished them with his shirt. “Finn, I’m just as worried about this as your mother, but I think this is something you have to do. I cannot and will not stop you. I found out the hard way that wishing won’t change reality. These things are real and you’re in a unique position to help their victims. You’re a man now and can make your own decisions.”
I swallowed hard and tried to stop shaking. “Thanks, Dad.”
He reached out and gave me a long hard hug. “I’m so damn proud of you, Finn. You are becoming one of the best men I know.”
That did it. I’m afraid I got my dad’s shirt a little damp before we parted.
I was back in the shadow stripping business. Yippee skippee.
Not the Summer of Love
As I may have intimated, my year to date had really sucked. It didn’t help that I’d brought it all on myself when I’d helped “excavate,” or perhaps more accurately “plunder,” the burial mound this spring. On the plus side, besides the skull holding Wendigota, I’d come away with two seriously cool items.
One was the Caduceus. If you squinted and looked at it in the right light, it kind of resembled the physician’s staff you see at hospitals and doctors’ offices from time to time—thus the name. It turned me into a beacon for the shadows, but it also gave me some seriously cool abilities.
The other item, a whistle made of red pipestone, had a carved bear sitting on top. When played correctly, the whistle turned you into a really, really big black bear. Despite dreams and other evidence to the contrary, I’d found it difficult to believe till I found myself looking up at a ten-foot-tall bear who used to be my friend. That is truly unsettling and difficult to deny. After watching Dave use it and inflate like a bear balloon, I let him keep it. It made me a bit queasy when I thought about using it on myself, but he seemed to get an endless kick out of it. So far, in spite of joking about having a hankering for grubs, it didn’t seem to have any negative side effects.
As presented to me in a dream, or perhaps a vision, the bear was just one of four totems used by the native people to take down Wendigota. We’d also recovered a snake whistle. Erik had used it to help him on his killing spree when Wendigota had hold of him. We’d never recovered the other two we knew to exist. The hawk and the cougar had been taken by some other grave robbers.
Any normal people would have called the stick and the bear “magic,” but being the science nerds my friends and I were, the term gave us all the heebie-jeebies. We’d finally agreed to call what they did “hoodoo” as a placeholder for “magic.” It seemed less of a “throw everything we know about physics out the window” term. “Mojo” had been a strong contender, but Austin Powers had ruined that. The clincher for me was that “hoodoo” rhymed with “doodoo,” and the two seemed inextricably linked.
In any case, magic was what happened in fantasies, physics was what happened in the real world. For us, “hoodoo” meant “anomalous physical effects initiated through the application of unknown forces”—in other words, magic.
Whatever you call it, the hoodoo of the stick awoke a dryad in my back yard (an irresistibly carnal predator), enabled the possession of my friend Jen, gave me supernatural healing abilities, and now it allowed me to contain Wendigota’s spirit in a cage in my brain and maintain Spring’s consciousness inside of me after Jen cut down her tree.
My experiences that summer had thrown out everything I thought I knew about the world. Along the way, I managed to traumatize my entire family, crush my house, turn my dad into a rodent-swallowing ghoul, get my friend killed, throw modern physics out the window, and create a lot of exciting stories for local and national reporters. This last point actually proved to be more important than I’d realized at the time.
It seemed only fair that the hoodoo would at least make me rich. The Randi Prize, a cool million for demonstrating supernatural powers, was mine for the taking...yeah right.
***
After everything went down with Wendigota, I’d leaned heavily on my friends to help me through it. Everyone reacted in different ways and had varying degrees of difficulty swallowing the inescapable conclusions our experiences forced on us, but it had bonded us together even more tightly than we had been before as good friends and role-playing gamers.
It was mid-summer, after Gregg’s death and before Jim, Jeff, and most everyone I counted as a friend, other than Dave, were college bound.
Four of us sat around the kitchen table over glasses of pop and a bag of nacho Doritos. Jim sat to my left leaning his chair back on two legs with his hands in his lap. He was slender with straight brown hair cut in a severely functional style just short of a bowl cut. Dave, slouched in the chair to my right, was the blondest person I’d ever seen. He was also hairy, but you’d never know it till he stood in the sun and you could see the halo around him. Across from me, Jeff leaned on the table. A bit thicker than Jim, he had an unruly mop of nearly black hair, a Roman nose, and a sort of distracted air as if he was always thinking about something more important than reality.
It wouldn’t be apparent from their looks, but there were three exceptionally keen minds here—plus mine. I used to believe my intellect to be on a par with my friends, but with the choices I’d been making lately, I figured I’d been too generous by half. It was probably for the best that I’d had to put off college for a year or more till I could bring myself to reapply and go without Gregg.
For weeks, we’d been talking and texting, and I’d been filling the guys in on some of t
he stuff Jen could recall from the priestess Il Saia’s memories. These were incomplete copies left behind after I’d erased her from Jen’s mind. (Another long story I’ve written about before. All you need to know now is that when you take a healthy girl, replace half of her mind with that of a high priestess we theorize was last seen on the planet when the hoodoo was everywhere and humanity was threatened with extinction by an ancient enemy, she goes a bit bonkers.)
When I removed Il Saia from Jen, her dad had interrupted the process, and some of the priestess’s knowledge remained behind—knowledge of the physics of Il Saia’s hoodoo. According to her, we were floating in a sea of the stuff.
“It’s still very hard for me to accept that there is some sort of universal energy field that people can tap into—that we’ve never seen,” said Jim. “Where is it? What is it? Why can’t we detect it? How does it fit into String Theory?”
“And, how can we use it to get chicks?” added Dave.
Jeff took what was often the safest path and ignored Dave. “I bet she’s talking about dark matter.”
“Bah.” Jim waved the thought away. “Dark matter and dark energy aren’t real. They’re just kludges added to physics to force the universe to fit into our current theories.” He equated the two concepts with epicycles—the overly the complex rules for the movement of planets proven wrong by Galileo. As a computer guy, I wasn’t even qualified to have an opinion on it.
“Who cares?” said Dave. “We know the hoodoo exists. It can turn me into a two-ton bear, for Christ’s sake. Once we get the million from the Randi Foundation, we can start a lab or something.”
“We’ve got to start making plans for winning that,” I said.
Jim shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, guys.”
I looked at him surprised and a bit nervous. If he said something wasn’t a good idea, he was probably right. He usually was. “What, why not?”
The Templar's Legacy (Ancient Enemy) Page 3