by Tom Deitz
His friends had said he was nuts—but Don knew they were wrong. He had witnessed magic, had himself been snared by a paralysis spell and watched a shapechanging ogress devour his best friend’s liver. But even more spectacularly, he’d seen his Cherokee friend, Calvin, change into an eagle and assorted other critters! And if the world allowed for spell-songs and shape-shifters, somewhere it surely should admit some art that would let him talk to Michael one last time.
And what better place than here, where Mike had died? And what better time than tonight, when the moon was full and the anniversary of Mike’s death but four nights away? He probably should’ve chosen the day itself, but he didn’t think he was up to that, and his mom would be watching him like a hawk anyway. Besides, and much more practically, the forecast called for showers then.
Taking a deep breath, Don swallowed hard, then squared his shoulders and strode into the campsite. He scanned the sliver of open earth atop the riverbank—not much larger than two cars side by side—for a staging area, and finally chose a waist-high stump at the western end. His stomach growled as he plopped down there, reminding him yet again that he hadn’t eaten in over a day—doubtless another reason he was tired. That had been some trick, too: fasting without his mom being the wiser. But she was preoccupied with her own sorrows—as usual—and didn’t think it odd that he took his meals to his room—and flushed them down the john on the way.
But it was what you were supposed to do, darn it! It was what Calvin had done. And it was what it said to do in the Book.
The Book…a worn old pamphlet on Cherokee magic he’d found in the Hinesville library. He had it now, and the other things he needed. He unslung the backpack and drew them out: four sticks as long as his forearm, each stained a different color, but all made of wood from a lightning-blasted tree, which the Book said were strong medicine. Next he produced a string: a two-foot length of cordage twisted from the inner bark of a North Carolina hickory he’d found on the same autumn leaf viewing trip as he’d got the most important object: the stone. The old man at the rock shop up at Asheville had called it cairngorm, but he knew it was simply a perfect, finger-long crystal of smoky quartz.
And if he was lucky, it would help him contact Mike. If not…well, he had one final ace up his sleeve. But since Mike had been killed by a Cherokee monster, Don figured a Cherokee means of reaching him might succeed where others hadn’t and ought to be attempted first.
So it was that a minute later Don had shucked his clothes and stood naked in the center of the clearing. He felt a little silly doing that, and it wasn’t specifically called for, but he was a white boy, and he wanted whatever powers he invoked to take him as seriously as possible, and the less that branded him as Caucasian, the more likely he figured they’d be to pay him heed. Besides, in a sense he was making a blood sacrifice—to judge by the mosquitoes already homing in, which seemed to have invited the neighborhood gnats as well. He’d be itching like hell tomorrow.
In the meantime, he ignored them as he knelt and inscribed a two-foot circle in the sand with the red stick. That concluded, he used the blue one to divide it into quarters oriented north and south, east, and west. The black stick limned a second circle around the first, and the white stick drew lines parallel to the enclosed cross. That concluded, Don stuck the sticks into the ground at the cardinal points: red to east, blue to north, black to west, and white to south.
Pausing only to wipe his hands on his well-nibbled thighs, Don returned to his pack and pulled out three more sticks. Again the wood was from a lightning-blasted tree, but this time it was from a red cedar, one of the plants of vigilance and also one that grew in graveyards thereabouts. One stick was straight and roughly two feet long, the others Y-shaped and six inches shorter. These last he planted on the north/south axis, then laid the third across them.
Satisfied with his work so far, he fished out two final objects: a lump of charcoal, and a square of denim from a pair of jeans Mike had cut off at Don’s house. The former he placed on the cross’s western arm, the latter on the east. An instant only it took to loop the cordage around the crystal and suspend it from the cross-stick, and he began. Holding his breath, he knelt at the south side of the circle, then slowly repeated the formula he had memorized from the Book. He did it in Cherokee first—or his version of that tongue, for he had no idea how to pronounce the odd-looking words, but he hoped the powers would understand his intent:
Sge! Ha-nagwa hatunganiga Nunya Watigei, ga-husti tsuts-kadi nigesunna. Ha-nagwa dungihyali. Agiyahusa aginalii, ha-ga tsun-nu iyunta datsi-waktuhi. Tla-ke aya akwatseliga. Donald Larry Scott digwadaita.
And then, just to be sure, he did it again in English.
Listen! Ha! Now you have drawn near to hearken, 0 Brown Rock, you never lie about anything. Ha! Now I am about to seek for it. I have lost a friend and now tell me about where I shall find him. For is he not mine? My name is Donald Larry Scott.
Eight times Don intoned the formula: twice from each prime direction. And when he had finished, he reached over the pattern he had inscribed and began to swing the crystal in a circle.
Round and round it went, faster and faster—a bit faster than he expected, in fact. But inevitably the pace slackened, and as it did, the circle tightened into an ellipse.
And as the crystal slowed, so did Don’s breathing—and so, it seemed, did the wind, until not a limb swayed or twig twitched or leaf shivered. Chills raced across Don’s ribs. The dark hairs on his forearms and legs and the nape of his neck prickled, and his skin went rough with goosebumps.
Slower and slower, and as Don’s breathing and the sighing of the wind fell silent, so did the rest of the night. Tree frogs ceased their chanting, mosquitoes and gnats their insistent buzz. The gator that had been bellowing in the nearby swamp broke off in midnote. And the crickets and cicadas stopped their contentious chatter. The only sound was the slapping of the creek against its banks and the non-noise of distant wings high above.
Slower and slower, and now the stone swung in a line, due east and west. But though Don had carefully knotted the string exactly over the center of the circle, he could not help but note that the arc tended to stretch a little further on its western transit—enough so that he could actually see the twig rock that way in the forks.
Which meant that Mike was dead.
Which he already knew.
What he did not know and, because of his contact with Calvin, had cause to wonder, was how dead.
Sighing, Don removed the charcoal and fabric (had Mike been alive the stone should have pointed toward the latter), moved to the south, and repeated the formula he had used before. Once more, too, he spun the crystal.
And again, after a nerve-wrackingly long time, it tended west.
Which only reinforced what it had told him already. For west, so the Book said, lay Tsusginai, the Ghost Country, the Cherokee land of the dead.
Yet that was not the direction in which Mike’s grave lay, for his father had had him cremated and the ashes scattered on the Atlantic, thirty miles to the east. Which meant that what remained of him as a conscious entity resided where the sun set.
And so, Don Scott faced that way and called out very softly, “Mike? I need to talk to you.”
Silence…
Silence…
Still that unnatural silence, as if all the woods wished and waited with him.
Silence…save for the lapping of the creek…
And then, abruptly, a splash: a crystalline sound, the perfect noise to focus the night. The ground thrummed softly beneath Don’s feet, and the wind resumed. But this time it carried a thread of melody.
Don tensed automatically. The last time he’d heard music in this place it had been Spearfinger’s terrible chant: Uwelanitsiku. Su sa sai!
But this time it was the sound of a wooden flute, and the tune one Don recognized. It was Mike’s favorite song: Deep Purple’s “Smoke On the Water.” But somehow, rendered thusly, as a long slow sigh upon the wind, it acqui
red a plaintive quality, a thin, reedy eeriness fraught with pain and loss.
Tears started in Don’s eyes as he rose. But just as he did, the string gave a twitch and suddenly shifted axes: north—toward the creek.
Don gulped, for part of him knew he ought not to be fooling around with such forces as he was. And another part knew he’d expected no result at all and was crazy to think he’d found one now, and a third part told him he was on the edge of some life-changing event and that he’d be well advised to fling the crystal in the river and run like hell and let the harsh light of day burn away whatever had answered his summons there in the Georgia night.
Instead, he eased toward the bank and looked down.
Iodine Creek glittered like a sky of black glass fractured by reflected lightnings, yet showing, in the calmer places, the shadow-sisters of the summer stars.
But he could see nothing more—yet the song persisted, no louder, but somehow clearer for all that, and coming, he was certain, from the water.
Grunting, Don scrambled down the chest-high bank to pause at the bottom, balanced on a root that curved down from the oak above. He squatted there, a pale naked wraith of a white boy, shimmered into silver by the moon, the only darkness the cap of hair on his head, the sketchy triangle at his groin, and his haunted eyes.
When he looked down he saw his own face mirrored. Clear it was: uncannily so. Grasping the root with one hand, he bent forward for a closer look, and when he did, it seemed the music grew louder and the breeze stirred the stream more vigorously, bending the ripples into patterns he could almost recognize.
And then he saw it! Gradually taking form atop his phantom features was another face: squarer of chin, more stubby of nose, and crowned with unkempt blond hair. The eyes were the color of the creek, and yet he knew they were blue. And then that face, which looked up at him through his own reflection, smiled, and the body that floated beneath it raised a hand.
“Mike!” Don Scott whispered—and had no choice but to grin back, and extend a hand in turn.
Chapter V: An Hour Almost Struck
(near Sytua, North Carolina—Friday, June 15—midnight)
Calvin was doing something he had vowed never to do: he was wishing, very hard, for rain.
Yeah, if a bank of clouds would just come rolling in from over the Smokys to the west, they could blank out the persistent moonbeams slanting in through the new bedroom skylight of Sandy’s hillside cabin like ramps laid in place for day. Then—maybe—he could sleep. As it was, the rays found the knotty pine walls far too easily, and awoke strange images there: here a tree, there an eagle or uktena, yonder a leering booger-face like one of the Davy Arch masks that hung, interspersed with handwoven baskets, from the exposed top plate of the opposite wall. And if he loosed his imagination even a little, the rays would conjure a crooked, grinning hag’s face—or, incongruously, a badger. Never mind what happened when they touched the coverlet—undisturbed now, on Sandy’s side, courtesy of a seminar on Buckyball over at Chapel Hill, which would claim her until late tomorrow. That was really bad, because the coverlet bore a black-and-white pattern, pirated from M. C. Escher, that depicted fish flying into birds, each shifting to the other where they met. And shapeshifting was the last thing he wanted to be reminded of just now.
That was the other reason he wanted rain. If clouds brought welcomed darkness, rain would bring a steady sussuration that, again—if he was lucky—might lull him to sleep. Certainly it would give him some focus besides the things that had been troubling him with increasing frequency lately—and looked set to have him tossing and turning and staring at the irksome wall and equally unpromising ceiling most of this night as well.
If only he hadn’t made the promise. The Red. Man had warned him about such things, damn it!—but that caution had come two days late. Oh, it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time—almost exactly a year ago now, at the close of the Spearfinger Affair—but tonight…he wondered.
He’d been in south Georgia, then, recovering from one of his and Dave’s Otherworld jaunts. He’d intended to hang out there and get his head straight about shape-shifting and such. But then he’d been accused of murdering his dad and discovered that Spearfinger was following him in hopes of getting at Dave. And somewhere in there he’d fallen in with a pair of Florida runaways named Robyn—that was the sister—and Brock. Brock had been just a kid: thirteen and full of attitude and testosterone and curiosity. Unfortunately, he’d also ferreted out the secret Calvin had tried so hard to hide because nobody could know such things and view the world the same after.
But Brock had seen him change shape and, like most kids his age, was crazy to know things others didn’t. He’d promptly attached himself to Calvin like many lads did to sports heroes and rock stars, and Calvin, unused to being idolized, had enjoyed that adoration. In due time Calvin had literally dissolved Spearfinger—and had a war name and an atasi to prove it (and odd new tattoos on his shoulder blades to mark it: quarter-sized cross-in-circles, surrounded by curving sun’s rays). But he’d been unable to dispose of Brock so neatly; and finally, after the dust had settled, Brock had asked him to teach him magic. Calvin hadn’t wanted to—even then he knew it was dangerous and had in no wise made him happy—and had told the boy as much: that sure, it sounded wonderful, but it was in fact far more a curse and responsibility to be endured than a treat to be enjoyed, and that he suspected Brock wanted it so as to be thought special, when the last thing in the world one ought to do with magic was show off. Still, the kid had looked so earnest, and had begged so pitifully, that Calvin had promised to meet him back there in Willacoochee County a year from then and teach him one piece of conjury.
And now that year was nearly up, he had a promise to keep, knew he had to keep it—and didn’t want to. But, as the Red Man said, promises were not to be taken lightly, especially when they concerned magic, especially when one was an apprentice adewehi.
Not that he’d actually seen Uki in the year since he’d acquired his war name, he hastened to add. Mostly he’d been taking high school equivalency courses at Western Carolina University and learning about the world at large—or the consensus reality most folks assumed was that world, more properly. But he’d been studying other things as well: had read every book on Indians he could find, had started haunting the pow-wow circuit, and had spent what little free time remained learning to identify every single plant and animal in the Appalachian woods, with their real and reputed properties.
That had all been cool. But now rashness had caught up with him, and he was afraid: afraid to fulfill the promise he’d made—and afraid to break it.
Trouble was, Brock showed every sign of holding him to the very letter of his vow. True, the boy had accompanied his sister to England to escape their abusive stepfather and be with her when she delivered the kid the old asshole had got on her. But he’d sent Calvin a series of notes—one per month, like clockwork. The latest had arrived earlier this week: too recently to send a reply. It had been postmarked in York; the message short and to the point:
Cal, m’man!
Greetings from the motherland—my motherland, anyway. I’m heading out on Saturday for your old home turf—so to speak. I’ll see you where I saw you last. Be there or be square! Looking forward to learning lots. Aloha. Make that Siyu! (I read that in a book!)
Cheers,
Brock-the-Badger No-Name
And that was that. Brock assumed he would fulfill his promise and was flying all the way from England to collect.
Calvin therefore had no choice but to oblige.
But if that troublesome lapse of responsibility was giving him grief (and that didn’t even count the small matter of what sort of arcana might be safe to teach a flaky teen), it was nothing to the other problem that had been deviling him of late.
He had become haunted.
It had been subtle at first, all small signs: a coolness near the winter fire where no drafts could find their way. The scent of tobacco smoke
while hunting in the trackless woods. A voice, one ridge over, calling out to Forest.
Unfortunately, Forest was one of his dead father’s favorite beagles, now in custody of one of his old man’s hunting buddies down in Jackson County, Georgia—not far from where Spearfinger had first appeared, in fact. Which didn’t bode well at all.
—Not in light of the sightings. Always at the between times they were, sunset or noon, midnight or dawn. A man-shaped shadow on open ground. A deeper darkness among the banks of rhododendron upslope from the cabin. Once, he was certain he’d seen eyes peering from a tree at precisely his dad’s height. But whenever he looked closely at any of them, they vanished. Even when he’d squinted through the hole in a water-bored stone, he’d got zip.
And now there were even more tangible signs. He’d leave something lying around—a new-flaked spear point, say, or a handful of porcupine quills. And the next time he looked for them they’d be gone. It was always his stuff, too: things that were part of his Cherokee heritage. He’d always found them—so far. But every time—every time—they’d moved west, as if some odd magnet had drawn them that way. And Calvin knew what lay in that direction. Tsusginai, the Ghost Country, in Usunhiyi, the Darkening Land, realm of the Cherokee dead.
And this week, the displacements had grown even more frequent, the spectral images clearer, so that he now found himself loathe to face the setting sun, because that was where the half-shapes always stood, the point from which the bodiless shadows spread.
And Sunday, he realized with a shudder, was the first anniversary of his father’s death! Why hadn’t he remembered that? Perhaps because he’d been sort of unstuck in time all spring, and not, for a change, thrall to schedules? Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to recall.
But something evidently, did, for the empty orbits of one of the masks on the wall across from him had suddenly acquired open eyes!
Wolf clan, he noted with a start: his own clan, though it had taken him most of last summer to chase down anyone at Qualla Boundary who knew enough of such things—and of Calvin’s genealogy—to tell him so.