His eyes shot open, confused, a smile creeping slowly across his lips as his daughter came into focus. “Morning, darlin’,” he said, reaching up to stroke the deep brown of her face. “You have good dreams again?”
She nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. I reckon you deserved ’em?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right,” he said, settling back into the chair. “Well, Dad needs a few more minutes’ sleep. So why don’t you—”
“Nuh-uh. You gotta get ready for work. Go take a shower. I’ll make breakfast.”
Her father smiled, face buried in the chair cushion, peering up at her with a single, squinting eye. “You know Dad’s still a little drunk, don’t you?”
She nodded sadly. “The shower and coffee will help.”
“Okay,” he said, grunting as he stood to his feet, leaving behind a cushion soaked with rancid drunk sweat, its stink wafting up after him, chasing him down the hall. “But only if you fry the eggs. Will you fry the eggs?”
“I’ll fry the eggs.”
“Over easy?”
“Over easy.”
He staggered slowly into the bathroom, calling back over his shoulder. “Kaycee Looes, you’re the best thing to ever happen to me.”
Kaycee smiled a little, wishing that were true and not just the rum talking. But she knew better.
Then she limped into the kitchen to make breakfast, mindful they were still days away from the next paycheck, knowing that she should probably scramble the eggs instead of frying them, watering them down with a little more milk than she’d like. Fortunately for her, the bread was about to turn, so she had no choice but to make extra toast, plumping out breakfast enough to keep them both full until lunch.
Her father slipped in, skin still steaming from the hot shower, curly black hair tousled and slick, eyes twinkling at the thought of sizzling eggs. “What’s with all the toast?”
“About to go stale.”
“Good. I like toast.”
“You better. It’s that and the eggs until lunch. Drink your coffee.”
He sipped at the mug, face souring a little. It wasn’t good. But that was hardly Kaycee’s fault. So he hid his displeasure, muscling down as much as he could stand without burning himself. Kaycee held the scalding-hot skillet above his plate, oil popping, thick egg white bubbling up, sliding two eggs off with a warped old spatula. Her father looked up, eyes pleading. “One more?” he asked.
“You want eggs tomorrow?”
He nodded.
“Then you only get two today.”
“Okay,” he said, looking down sadly.
“Eat ’em slow.”
Wade took a small bite of dry toast, smiling, twitching an eyebrow playfully at his daughter. She smiled back, slid a single egg onto her own plate, and put the skillet back on the stove.
The two ate together in silence, Wade trying to sober up, wishing he didn’t have to, Kaycee trying not to think about the fact that this was going to be the very best part of her day. They powered through the dry toast and the bad coffee, but the eggs were perfect. Piping hot, lightly salted, a dash of pepper. They slid warm and greasy into the belly, at once sobering Wade up.
It was morning again, and he was ready to go back to it. He kissed his daughter on the cheek, wrapping his massive arms around her, then headed out to catch his ride back into town.
Kaycee quickly cleaned the kitchen then readied herself for school—a quick shower and a few strokes of a brush through her hair before tossing on a clean shirt and a pair of shorts. Then she slipped a sandal onto her one good foot, turned off the television, locked the front door, and walked out to the curb to wait for the van to school.
She stood there, staring at her shadow on the ground, the bland, dingy colors of the dry earth stinging in the harsh Australian morning sun. The van always picked her up last, already overflowing with kids. Kaycee dreaded seeing them, hated the moment when the van pulled up and the doors opened and not one of them looked out the window or up at her as she passed them. They weren’t cruel. No one would utter a word about her foot or the split in her lip. There would be no name calling, no harassment. Instead it was as if she wasn’t even there. The invisible kid meant for the seat no one else dared sit in lest they be forced into eye contact or to exchange a few uncomfortable words.
Sometimes she wished people would say something, make fun of her in some shape or form, if only so she could put them in their place; if only so she could feel like they saw her. She hated being awake. She hated the world outside sleep. In the dream, she could be whatever she wanted; here, she was what everyone thought she was.
And that was nothing. Nothing at all.
CHAPTER 9
ON KUTJI
AN EXCERPT BY DR. THADDEUS RAY, PH.D., FROM HIS BOOK DREAMSPEAKING, DREAMWALKING, AND DREAMTIME: THE WORLD ON THE OTHER SIDE OF DOWN UNDER
Shadows are not necessarily spirits of the dead, though they are formed by the painful, agonizing, or tortured death of a human being. But these are not the persons themselves, merely reflections of the very worst or most powerful parts of them. While it is true that they are comprised of dreamstuff squeezed from a deceased soul, they are not beings of memory, intellect, or experience. They are beings of deep emotion and fear. They are monsters born of lingering hate, pain, or agony.
Shadows do not exist to achieve goals fostered in life—at least not in the way they were initially intended—but rather to carry out some new mission to assuage the painful scars that forged them. These are scars that never heal, wounds that never close. Shadows press on like Sisyphus, forever clawing at the night, continuing to do the same terrible things over and over again until they have no dreamstuff left to press on any farther.
Some shadows, like boggarts, become mostly sentient. Most of the time they behave as they did in life, albeit with much more pronounced traits or quirks. The only point at which their shadowy nature becomes a hindrance on their personality is when they feed or fight. It is in those moments that their lack of humanity shows through and their truly terrible natures bubble to the surface. One can live in close proximity to a boggart for quite some time without ever feeling in danger or actually being in danger for that matter. But shadows are comprised of darkness, and eventually they must succumb to that.
Other shadows, like La Llorona, are much more feral than their more humanlike cousins. These creatures are formed from women destroyed by their own grief and madness, and thus that is all that remains of them. They wander the earth, reliving their final moments, trying desperately to get it right this time around. Their memories are short, their personalities only approximations of humanity, their attempts to imitate behavior existing only as a self-defense mechanism. They seduce men to keep them from becoming a threat and they use whatever guile they can to gain access to children they can drag into the water.
Kutji, on the other hand, are somewhere between these two extremes.
A kutji is a shadow native to the deserts of the outback. Often appearing warped and distorted, they are shaped as their shadow hung at the moment their body passed. This leaves them ranging in appearance from short, squat, and square to tall, lithe, and gangly, possessed of limbs the length of a grown man. Their bodies are made entirely of darkness and thus they are terrified of the sun, living in holes, cracks, or under rocks and abandoned vehicles. If caught away from their haunts near dawn, they will take shelter anywhere dark and hide until the sun sets once more. Exposure to sunlight boils them away almost immediately and, once destroyed, they will never return. While artificial light is painful to them, it poses no real threat and they will endure it if the reason is good enough.
Kutji are usually formed as the result of violent, unjust, or unwelcome death. It is very rare for a peaceful or accidental death to result in forming one. Most often they are formed by the fear and anger building up over a short period of time between learning of their death and experiencing it. In that moment, the dying think of all the
things they left unfinished, all of the anger they have for the person killing them, and they cling to that rather than finding release. The moment their soulstuff is released, if an area is as particularly rich in dreamstuff as the outback is, a kutji can be formed.
They do not exist as they did in life. Their wit, their passionate desires, and their quirks remain, but their humanity is stripped from them, so much so that they don’t even bother to imitate it. They are in thrall to their desires, trying again and again to achieve the unattainable satisfaction of completing whatever task eluded them in life. Oftentimes this can be the accumulation of wealth, satiating sadistic urges, or getting revenge for some slight done to them. On rare occasions the task can be specific, like getting hold of a certain item or killing an individual. But like many spirits, the kutji lose their way over time and those desires become blurred, muddled, sometimes confusing one object with another.
The kutji cannot be satisfied. It is their curse. They walk the earth, fearing the light, convinced that completing their task offers some great reward. Whether it be death, a respite, or a return to the land of the living, they each pine for something and think achieving it will grant it to them. But it never does.
However short of memory they might be about their reason for being, they are both long of memory and extraordinarily patient. A kutji will work for years, even decades, on a single task. But unable to affect many things in the mortal world, they often must turn to dreamspeakers or anyone else able to peer past the veil. With these people, the kutji often strike bargains, offering to do dark deeds or help gather the dreamstuff to perform magic. Dreamspeakers, better known as Clever Men or shamans, have learned over time to cultivate relationships with local kutji and call upon them to do whatever they need done, often unaware of the kutji’s true motivations. In truth, these motivations rarely affect the dreamspeaker, as it is customary for the first deal struck to be one of nonaggression.
Kutji, like many spirits, are bound to their own word. As certain memories fade, so too do the details surrounding such an agreement, leaving behind only the prohibition or promise and an understanding that this prohibition or promise is sacred law. Breaking such an oath is like deciding to put your hand into a fire, or to jump from a cliff, or to cut off your own foot. They believe doing so is the key to their undoing, no matter how small or insignificant the agreement might be.
Unlike more terrifying menaces, kutji aren’t particularly violent or directly malicious. More often than not, a kutji’s requests will seem ridiculously simple, almost mundane. Sometimes they serve no other purpose than to fulfill a desire or habit they performed in life, like drinking or smoking. But it is wise not to take all of their requests lightly, for they are playing a long game. It is possible the small task you perform for them in the physical world is the puzzle piece they need to do something terrible far down the road or is meant to bring some harm to the person performing it. In fact, you can almost always be assured that it is. One should never agree to a kutji’s terms before thinking through what they are asking for.
While kutji often appear as spirits, they can show themselves in a number of different forms, ranging from animals like kangaroos, crows, owls, eagles, bandicoots, emus, and snakes; they can also manifest as dust storms, rain clouds, or even thunder. They can also possess these creatures in order to travel over great distances or appear to those who cannot perceive their spirit forms easily. Their powers over the souls of others allow them to possess human beings, at a great cost to their own energy, infect others with disease, or even cause death.
But kutji rarely bother those who cannot see or hear them, for they find them to be of little use. The only time one can expect to be bothered by one is if you somehow play into achieving their goals. As long lived as kutji are, these are not goals it is easy to simply blunder into. On the rare occasion that you find yourself the target of a kutji’s intentions, all bets are off. It is cases like these when any reports of aggression or deliberate malfeasance arise. They are beings with hazy memories, and without remorse; expect little quarter.
CHAPTER 10
AUSTIN
Colby meandered into the bar with a belly full of lasagna and an ass still sore from his awkward, painful landing in the grass behind Carol Voss’s house. He didn’t want to go home yet, but he didn’t want to be around the denizens of the Cursed and the Damned either. So he quietly slid into a small bar, hoping to blend in with the flimsy plywood and ironic neon.
He ordered a cheap Mexican import served with a lime in the neck of the bottle and made his way out through a metal door to the back patio. Limestone walls ranging from knee high to almost ten feet tall surrounded a courtyard littered with cheap metal tables, a chain-link fence boxing in the rest. It was a nice, quiet place to have a beer and ignore the rest of the world. There were no demons, no angels, no djinns.
Just a blonde. A beautiful, heartbreaking blonde.
And she was sitting alone.
She was slender, tan, freckled, blond hair spilling out from under a braided-cord straw cowboy hat, wearing a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, faded blue jeans, and hand-painted sneakers. One arm was smooth and bare while the other was a complete sleeve of brightly colored tattoos. The corners of her mouth twitched into a slight smile when she saw Colby and it felt as if the whole patio had brightened at once. Her delicate fingers fondled a local craft brew and she bit her lip slightly.
It was a slow night and they were otherwise alone.
The blonde traced the rim of her bottle with a single finger and watched as Colby took a seat a few tables away. He tried not to look at her, clumsily trying to show that he wasn’t creeping up on her.
“That’s not really a Mexican beer, you know,” she said.
Colby looked up, a little confused. He’d been thinking of a dozen different ways she might shoot him down and had no idea how to react to her speaking directly to him. He swallowed hard. “Um, huh?”
“The beer. It’s not Mexican.”
Colby looked down at the beer in his hand. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, they make them in San Antonio from a Mexican recipe and just put imported on the bottle. It’s the same guys who make all the cheap stuff.”
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at her own beer.
“Local.”
“You like it?”
“It’s pretty much the same shit you’re drinking, only more expensive.” She stood up and took a few graceful steps over to his table and pointed at the empty chair beside him. Not across. Beside. “May I?”
“Uh, yeah! Yeah!”
She plopped down in the chair far less gracefully than she’d walked and took a swig of beer. “It costs more, but the money stays here in town, puts guys I know to work, so it’s worth it.”
“Oh, local economy and all that.”
“I’m Austin,” she said, raising her beer.
“Colby,” he said, raising his.
“You know, I gotta say, I imagined you much more well spoken than this.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Do I have you flustered or are you just normally like this around people?”
“I . . . well . . . yeah. It’s you.”
She smiled, reaching into the hip pocket of her jeans. “I can dig that. Just as long as the conversation gets better as the night goes on.” Austin pulled out a small bag of weed and a pack of papers and, without a thought, began rolling a joint.
“What are you doing?”
With a quick lick and a twist of her wrists, she wrapped the paper up tight into a perfectly formed spliff. “Rolling one up. You wanna share or would you like your own?”
“Uh, no. Um, thanks though.”
Austin laughed. “I never pegged you for a prude.” She lit the joint and took a quick puff.
“I’m not a prude. It’s just, we’re out in public.”
She held her breath for a second, then exhaled loudly. “There’s n
ot a cop within three blocks of this place and not one who will walk by for another . . . fifty minutes, give or take.”
“That’s a little specific.”
“They have schedules. Routines. Habits. Lots of things that keep them in other places and then bring them here. But nothing that will bring anyone here anytime soon.”
“Well, what about the bartenders?”
“The bartenders?” she asked. “Have you ever known any bartenders? Our biggest concern then is bogarting this. You worry too much.”
“And you seem pretty relaxed.”
“Trust me. It’s still, like, forty-nine and a half minutes before anyone comes by. Maybe forty-nine even.”
Colby pursed his lips. “Who are you?”
“You still don’t recognize me, do you?”
“Not even a little. Do we know each other?”
She shook her head. “No. We know of each other. I’ve read your books. I’ve seen you around. But know . . . ?”
Colby’s jaw dropped open. “Wait, you’re—”
“Austin.”
“The Austin.”
She smiled. “No. Just Austin. There’s no the.”
Colby gawked at her for a moment, stunned speechless.
She took another drag off the joint, held her breath deeply for a moment, letting Colby wrap his head around what was going on, then exhaled. “You sure you don’t want a hit of this? It’s amazing stuff.”
“No, really.”
“Aw, Colby. I thought you were cool.”
“No you didn’t. No one thinks I’m cool.”
“Okay. I didn’t. But I did hope you would get cool-er.”
Colby sipped his beer, the wheels turning in his head. “Wait a second. Why haven’t we met until just now?”
“Because we never had to before today.” Her eyes turned cold and serious. She wasn’t playing around anymore. “You crossed the line tonight, Colby. It wasn’t your place to do what you did.”
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