Ghostcountry's Wrath

by Tom Deitz

  Shirtless, barefoot, and inclined to stay that way for a spell, given how hot the bunk room in Aikin Daniels’s unair-conditioned mountainside cabin had become in the few hours since he and his MacTyrie Gang buddies had deserted it, he scooped a pile of mostly-white clothing from the oiled pine floor and began transferring his wallet, keys, and checkbook from the tuxedo pants he had so eagerly abandoned to the faded cutoffs that replaced them now.

  Amid the chaos of sleeping bags, backpacks, pizza boxes, beer bottles, and X-rated videotapes that updated the otherwise rustic room, that same Aikin “M. H.” (for Mighty Hunter) Daniels whose parents owned the cabin was likewise transforming himself from groomsman to civilian; moving, as always, with the near-absolute silence that was his stock-in-trade. A low, steady hiss to David’s right was Calvin McIntosh showering in the adjoining john. The faint odor of Coast soap wafted between the diagonal planks of the ill-fitting door. David wished he’d hurry. They needed to talk—badly. Not here, of course—with Aik’s overly eager ears alert and starved for secrets. But soon—real soon.

  “Yeah, thank God it’s over,” Aikin agreed, oblivious to David’s subtle agitation, as he stuffed the tail of his black Sandman T-shirt into his own cutoffs. He retrieved his silver-framed glasses from the scarred oak dresser in the corner and raised inky eyebrows into like-colored bangs in relief.

  “Guess it’s your turn now,” David chided. He unbound his “formal” ponytail, turned to the single mirror, which hung between the windows, and applied a comb to his thick, white-blond hair.

  Aikin bared his teeth at the taunt, then flung his tux jacket straight at him.

  David observed the attack in the glass, plucked the garment neatly from the air, and whirled it back whence it came, then flopped against the rough-hewn wall. Aikin wadded the forsaken formal wear into his backpack and eased toward the greatroom door.

  Before he reached it, however, it flew open, and Alec McLean stomped in, likewise (and atypically) barefoot, and with his purple satin bowtie undone and trickling down his shirtfront, but otherwise still fully clad in the regalia the Gang had endured for Gary Hudson’s wedding. He lugged a duffle bag: as gray as his eyes and almost as elegantly slim. In line with his abrupt entrance, he also looked very harried.

  Aikin flicked an unclaimed pair of Enotah County ’Possums gym shorts at him—which he dodged. “So what’s the deal, Mach-One? You don’t look like a happy camper.”

  Alec shook his spiky dark head as he advanced into the room, releasing shirt studs in the process. “How’d you like havin’ a dog-drunk Darrell Buchanan vomit red velvet wedding cake all over your dashboard, then pass out cold?”

  David rolled his eyes. “That’s our Runnerman.”

  “What about Cal’s lady?” Aikin wondered. “Sandy, or whatever? I thought you were gonna lead her up here.”

  Alec flung down his bag and commenced to undress in earnest. “She needed to pick up a couple things in town but said she’d come up after that if she got antsy—assuming she can pry Liz away from the other bridesmaids long enough to show her the way. Otherwise, we’re supposed to rendezvous at the Pizza Hut in MacTyrie. Me and Dave and Cal are,” he added apologetically to Aikin. “Sorry to stick you with K.P. man.”

  “I’m not stupid!” Aikin growled. “I know you guys’ve got some big secret you’re hot to download. It’s no big deal.”

  David shot Alec a wary glance. “Sorry—really. I’ll tell you what I can when I can, I promise.”

  “Yeah, like ten years from now,” Aikin muttered. He stared at them a moment longer, then grimaced sourly and slipped out of the room, silently as always: the quietest person David knew—save Calvin. He also made an obvious point of closing the door. David wondered what he was thinking.

  “So, where is young Mr. Macintosh?” Alec asked offhandedly.

  David dipped his head toward the loo. “Made a beeline for the shower as- soon as Aik got the door open. Said he couldn’t stand himself a minute longer. Seems the A.C. in Sandy’s truck died right when they hit the road this morning.”

  Alec laughed out loud. “Six hours in this heat? No wonder he was so ripe at the wedding!”

  “I can’t believe he actually changed in the middle of the field!” David giggled. “No, actually I can, knowin’ Cal. And we were standin’ guard around him—sort of.”

  “He say why he was late?”

  David shook his head, suddenly serious. “Just what he told us when he called to say he was on his way.”

  “It’s complicated, and I only want to have to tell it once,” a new voice called above the fading hiss of the shower expiring.

  Once again Alec and David exchanged glances: blue and gray eyes locked in quizzical resignation. While David collected his finery, Alec resurrected his civilian persona. An instant later, the bathroom door squeaked open, releasing a cloud of steam around a muscular, rusty-skinned young man who stood there applying one end of a long blue towel to shoulder-length black hair, while the other flirted with his thighs.

  David stared fixedly at the opposite wall as Calvin continued drying himself. “So, Fargo,” he drawled, “when are you gonna reveal this great secret of yours?”

  “Besides the one he’s already revealing?” Alec chuckled. “Doesn’t look so great to me!”

  “Eat me, White Boy!” Calvin snarled.

  “Don’t have a fork that small,” Alec shot back. Calvin bent over to dry his legs—which not so coincidentally mooned him.

  “Neither does your tattoo, actually,” Alec observed coolly, refusing to be baited. “—Look good, I mean.” “

  Eat me!”

  David glanced at Calvin’s bare backside reflexively, in quest of the cross-in-circle tattoo that had always graced—if that word was appropriate to such a referent—his friend’s upper right “cheek.” “God, he’s right!” he gasped. “It’s all…faded!”

  Calvin straightened and craned his neck to peer over his shoulder, then gave up and padded to the mirror, where he proceeded to peruse his bottom critically. “Well, that’s interestin’,” he mused. “Not that I spend a lot of time lookin’ at my butt, or anything. Gosh, I bet it’s ’cause—”

  He broke off, scowling, and unhooked a small, mud-colored leather bag from a peg by the door and slipped the thin cord over his head. It thumped against his chest and lodged against a glassy, palm-sized object wrapped in copper wire and depending from a wet and obviously brand-new rawhide thong. First things first, David noted: mojo before modesty.

  “’Cause why?” he prompted.

  “The door can be locked,” Alec added. “Runner-man’s out of it, and Aik’ll forgive us—eventually.”

  “Poor Aik.” David sighed, shaking his head.

  “You guys still haven’t told him?” From Calvin.

  “Not much,” David grunted. “’Course we don’t know everything either,” he added pointedly.

  “Start with the tattoo,” Alec suggested.

  Calvin fingered the vitreous ornament between his pecs. “I…was gonna say that I bet it’s faded ’cause of all the shapeshifting I’ve been doin’ lately.”

  Alec looked stricken—as he usually did when such topics arose. David shot him a glare and gnawed his lip. “I thought you didn’t like doing that,” he ventured at last.

  Calvin fished a pair of flowered boxer shorts from a battered khaki knapsack. “Not likin’ something and not doin’ something are two different somethings,” he observed as he slipped them on. “But like I said, I’ve been doin’ a lot of shapeshiftin’—and I guess every time I do, the tattoo loses something. I mean, it’s not part of me, really. Like—”

  “Oh, I see!” David broke in eagerly. “When you change back to human, your body has to reconstruct you according to your genetic blueprint. Only the tattoo’s not part of it, so it has to make do as best it can.”

  Calvin nodded. “And when you turn into something with scales—which I, to my regret, have lately done—it’s kinda hard for a few grains of pigment
to figure out where to go, ’cause there aren’t any analogous structures. Like, rattlesnakes don’t even have hipbones, much less asses!”

  Both David’s brows shot up. “Rattlesnakes?”

  “A matter of necessity. I don’t recommend the experience.”

  “Which is very interesting,” Alec inserted. “But which doesn’t explain why you’re late—or all that B.S. on the phone. I mean, you called right after we discovered…it. And at the last possible moment before we had to split for the bachelor party. Five minutes later, and you’d have missed us.”

  Calvin stepped into a pair of jeans. “Sorry ’bout that,” he mumbled. “Sorry I had to be so vague, too, but I didn’t trust the phone not to be tapped.”

  “By whom?” David asked.

  “By the police in Whidden, Georgia, for one; by the G.B.I., for another. Probably the feds as well. Shoot, for all I know, they’re snoopin’ now!”

  “I would think it highly unlikely that this room’s bugged,” Alec intoned sarcastically. “And I’m not sure anything can snoop through solid log walls.”

  David folded his arms across his chest. “It’s time you talked, Fargo.”

  “Okay, okay.” Calvin sighed. “Well, to give you the quick and dirty version: I’m sure you remember our, uh, adventures of last week….”

  “How could we forget?” David snorted. “World-hopping like crazy, shapeshifting, daring rescues, Faery naval battles, you name it.”

  “There’s something you don’t know, though.”

  “What?”

  Calvin took a deep breath. “You remember that night in Jackson County when I conjured up that fog, so I could summon Awi Usdi, the Little Deer, so he could call a real deer for me to get blood from? So I could use it to empower Alec’s ulunsuti to open a gate to that place those guys were holdin’ Finno?”

  “Okay…”

  “Well, I got something else as well,” Calvin whispered shakily. “Or something answered, anyway. “Guys, I…I called Spearfinger!”

  “Shit!”

  Calvin nodded grimly. “The lady—if you can call her that—herself. Seems she’d been followin’ us—you, in particular—ever since the first time we went to Galunlati. And when I opened the gate between Worlds for Awi Usdi, she sneaked through as well.”

  David’s face was very pale. “And…you’ve had to deal with her.”

  Again Calvin nodded. “And she’s killed, Dave! She…she even killed my dad!”

  David sat down with a thud. “Oh, Jesus!”

  An even grimmer nod. “And a woman and a couple of kids.”

  Silence.

  “I killed her, though—I hope.”

  “You hope?”

  A shrug this time. “She’s a supernatural creature not native to this world. I’m not sure what to believe. But I saw her die. In this world I saw her die.”

  “Let’s see,” Alec mused. “She’s that shapechanging, liver-eating ogress from Galunlati, right? The one with power over stone—”

  A knock rattled the door, jerking David back to the present. “What’re you guys doin’ in there?” Aikin demanded. “Tonto’s lady just drove up—and I’m stuck out here with a sot!”

  “Tough,” David called through the door, even as he moved to open it. “I’m in here with a Cherokee sorcerer!”

  *

  “I hope you know what a lucky son-of-a-bitch you are,” David muttered to Calvin twenty seconds later, as they and Alec neatly sidestepped the resigned Aikin and the reeling Darrell (who had somehow achieved the porch) and bounded down the split-log steps into the sparse stand of pines that comprised the cabin’s front yard. A laurel hell fenced it upslope to the right, beyond which the Enotah National Forest began in earnest. To the left, a narrow rutted road snaked up the wooded mountainside from MacTyrie three miles away. A motorcycle and two cars crouched near the porch. Cal’s BMW bike, Aikin’s old brown Nova, and the battered red ’66 Mustang David called the Mustang-of-Death (as of the previous weekend, closer to simply a dead Mustang, he thought dully).

  But a newish red-and-black Ford Bronco had joined them, knobby tires straddling the terminal ruts. Silver mylar on all side windows wrapped the interior with mystery and obscured the occupants, if any. “Now that raises an interesting question,” Alec smirked, when they stopped beside it. “Is it an insult to call a shapechanger a son-of-a-bitch?”

  “Only if he hasn’t eaten dog,” a new voice volunteered: low and musical, with a soft Carolina drawl—and definitely female. David whirled around, cheeks aflame with a mix of irritation and embarrassment. He’d seen no sign of Sandy, and then suddenly there she was: five feet away and grinning like a ’possum. She’d apparently been lying in wait behind the nearest pine.

  “Hey!” David laughed, stepping forward to enfold Calvin’s lady in the properly hearty hug he hadn’t had time for at the wedding because of preoccupation; or at the reception, where he’d had his hands full overseeing the degradation of Gary’s getaway car. Now, though, he’d finally got a good look at her, and he liked what he saw.

  Though a high school physics teacher in her middle-twenties, Sandy Fairfax looked little older than his own girlfriend, Liz Hughes, who had just turned eighteen. She was tallish and slim, with serious features, a gently arching nose, and a waist-length sweep of straight, sun-bleached hair that was presently confined in a ponytail, though she’d let it down for the wedding. She’d worn a flouncy spring green cotton dress, then, with a belt of linked silver dogwood blossoms. Now she was attired more typically: jeans, white Reeboks, and a scarlet T-shirt hyping a locally produced educational film called Voices in the Wind. She wore no makeup, but a pair of tiny dream catchers depended from her ears. Yeah, David thought, Calvin was a damned lucky S.O.B.

  “Liz saw a bird she wanted to get a shot of,” Sandy explained, in response to a concern David had not yet realized himself. “You’re lookin’ good,” she added with an exaggerated twang, as she released him. “Not as good as a couple hours ago, though. Ain’t nothin’ like handsome lads in tuxes.”

  Calvin slid an arm around her waist and grinned. “Actually,” he confided, “what she really means is there’s nothin’ like a handsome man in his birthday suit!”

  “The operative word being man,” Sandy countered smartly.

  David grinned obligingly, then checked his watch and craned his neck, his gaze combing the woods.

  Sandy saw him. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to fill in your part of this little conundrum while we wait for your gal, would you?” she ventured brightly.

  “Liz didn’t tell you?” David replied, surprised. “She hasn’t seen…it either, but she does know about it, ’cause I told her.”

  “Called her in the middle of the bachelor party!” Alec confided to Calvin, sounding disgusted. “I—”

  They were spared further digression by the emergence of a slender red-haired girl from behind the Bronco. Like Sandy, Liz Hughes was wearing jeans and a T-shirt (hers was dull burgundy), which to David looked exactly as smashing as the complex lime-sherbet bridesmaid dress she’d sported in the wedding.

  “Sorry,” she panted as she jogged up to join them, pausing to give David a perfunctory peck on the cheek. “I thought it was a red-tail, but then I realized it was a peregrine, which are really rare, and—” She broke off, looked at David with frank openness. “You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?”

  “’Fraid so,” he admitted, and turned to give Aikin a silent farewell salute before steering Alec toward the Mustang. Aikin nodded sketchily, stuffed a shoulder under Darrell’s armpit, and dragged him inside. “Catch you later,” he grunted from the door.

  “Yeah, thanks,” David yelled back. “As for hurrying,” he added to Liz, “well, it’s a pretty big deal, at least to me, even if it’s not a matter of life or death.”

  “Which it’s not,” Calvin agreed. “At least I hope not. But a couple days ago, it was a very big deal indeed.” He did not add, David noted, that affairs still might not be settled�
�if Liz had really seen what she’d claimed. The peregrine was Cal’s totem. And to see one anytime, especially so far inland, was cause for concern.

  “You lead,” Sandy told David, fishing in her pocket for her keys. “Me and Liz’ll follow, in case we can’t keep up.”

  “Yeah,” Alec muttered, “and maybe old Cal’ll finally set us straight about his mystery.”

  “They are related,” Calvin told him. “But like I said, I don’t wanta get into it until I can lay out the whole tale without interruptions. And I don’t wanta do that till I’ve got a look at your surprise.”

  “Which we’ll never do, if we spend all day jawing,” Liz concluded practically. “Come on folks, let’s travel!”

  *

  Thirty minutes later, Calvin, Alec, David, Liz, and Sandy were standing in a semicircle before a truck-sized outcrop of dark granite that thrust from a wooded slope behind David’s parents’ barn. Beyond rose forested mountains; behind was the farm proper, dipping to the Sullivan Cove Road, with, across it, another ridge. The highway slashed through the river bottom a hundred yards to their left.

  But it was the rock face itself that focused their attention—something in the rock face, more precisely. Specifically, it was a life-sized simulacrum of David—wrought entirely of rounded pebbles and poised as if frozen in the act of striding from the stone: left foot and right arm extended, expression one of alarm or surprise. Little more was obvious, save that the naked (and, to David’s embarrassment, excruciatingly anatomically correct) effigy was patently no work of nature—which, given what Calvin had said earlier about Spearfinger’s mastery over stone, was not comforting at all.

  “Well, it’s a good likeness, anyway!” Calvin opined at last. “Even better than I remember, actually.”

  “I’m pleased you approve,” David growled acidly. “Now, do you happen to have any idea what it’s doing behind our burning dump?”

  “Weatherin’ away slowly,” Calvin replied promptly, but his expression belied his flippancy.

  Sandy eased forward to inspect the effigy more closely. “Hmmm,” she murmured, “I see two weird things right off—not counting how it happens to look like Dave, of course.”