by Steve Vernon
“Do you believe in monsters, Teller-boy?” the shadow man repeated.
I opened my mouth.
My lips were dry and stuck together. My swallow had disappeared somewhere on the other side of the Gobi Desert – probably riding on a camel train of cotton balls and talcum powder and those weird little packets of silica gel that you find at the bottom of your vitamin jar.
I had forgotten how to make words follow one another. I had forgotten just how to string thought together into anything close to making sense.
But I had to say something.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe in monsters and I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy and I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, either.”
Where was Warren when I really needed him?
Where was Bigfoot?
Where was Nanna Bijou?
“You are awfully young to be acting so cynical,” the shadow man said. “When did you learn to not believe in a story told true?”
“Monsters aren’t real,” I said, scornfully. “They’re mythological.”
“Mythological?” the shadow man said. “That is a pretty large multi-syllable-mouthful of a word for a little bitty kid like you.”
Kid?
“I’m seventeen years old,” I said. “That makes me a teenager, not a kid. Do you want to hear me recite my A-B-C’s?”
“Only if you can say them backwards.”
So I turned around backwards, looking away from him, as I began to recite.
“A, B, C, D, E…”
Which I thought was pretty funny – but when I said it out loud the words I was speaking didn’t come out as A-B-C-D-E.
It came out as B.C.W.F.C.O.T.F.O.H.E.
I felt those word-letters spilling out of my mouth like I had chewed into a bowl of apple sauce and come up with a mouth full of cast iron apple seeds.
“And a case of freaking nails,” the shadow man finished up. ”Isn’t that what you were trying to spell, Teller-boy? Isn’t that what really killed your Dad? Of course I mean your real Dad, not your step-dad Warren – isn’t that what really and truly killed him?”
I opened up my mouth.
I closed it.
So far as I could tell no words fell out in between.
“Look at me, Teller-boy,” the shadow-man said.
I don’t do anything for people who end a sentence aimed my way with the word “boy”, but it was as if he had hold of my puppet strings. I turned like my feet were built on a set of well-oiled steel swivels.
“My name isn’t Teller,” I said. “That’s my step-dad’s last name. I keep telling you people that my real last name is Rooker.”
“What do you know about rooks, boy?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“Look at me,” the shadow man repeated, dropping each word at my feet like a single fallen drum beat.
And then the shadow man began to change.
He began to spread as if his shoulders were somehow slowly separating. I saw long dark wing-shadows stretching out above us. I felt like one of those old movie cowboys – like I had been crawling across the desert dying of thirst and looked down to see the buzzard shadows circling about my dying body.
The shadow man was Raven.
The shadow man was the same giant magic bird that had stolen the spirit bear. He was the same giant magic bird that had stolen a piece of Warren’s spirit.
I didn’t get it.
Why had Nanna Bijou sent me to the guy I was trying to run from?
Did he want me to die?
And then I began to change too.
I hate it when that happens.
Nothing sucks worse than change.
Chapter Thirteen – In Which I Grow Wings
I felt the change happen slowly, like I was drawing the entire transformation inside of myself in a long slow drawn-out breath. I felt something soft and fluttery being dragged and pulled and tugged from out of my bones. I felt veins stiffening and sharp shooting pain shouting out as if someone were sticking giant white hot darning needles into my skin and then yanking them back out fast.
I felt as if my blood was made out of something like the ocean and the sky above the ocean was on fire and everything inside of me had just begun to boil.
I squeezed my eyes closed and for just a moment I saw nothing but a long swallow of midnight black.
I heard a giant crow laughing over me – with a harsh caw.
I wondered just what was so funny.
And then I opened my eyes.
There was nothing but clear blue and patches of white cloud. I could see my feet hanging beneath me only they had stretched out into hard yellow sticks.
No, not sticks.
Talons.
Bird feet.
I looked down at myself and then I realized that somehow I had been magically turned into a giant crow.
“You just feel that you are a giant, is all,” I heard the shadow man talking above me. “You are not really a giant at all. You have seen a giant before, haven’t you, Teller-boy?”
I knew that he was talking about Old Nanna Bijou and for about the hundredth time since the last five minutes I wondered why in the world did Nanna Bijou send me to see this freaking creep?
Were they friends or something?
Maybe partners?
What had Bigfoot got me into?
I looked up above me and all that I could see was a field of darkness. I felt a little like an aircraft trying to land on an aircraft carrier only I had got my directions turned around and the carrier was floating above me while I flew deep down in the water.
“You know,” the shadow man cawed down at me. “For a fellow who only watches television and Youtube videos you have one heck of a peculiarly vivid imagination.”
It was one heck of a little peculiar seeing a giant crow talking down at me in the middle of what had to be a nightmare in the middle of the day.
“I’m a raven,” the bird corrected me. “You’re a crow.”
“What’s the difference?” I cawed back.
I’m not really sure if I was cawing or talking or just thinking about cawing and talking but he seemed to understand me just fine.
“The old people will tell you that crows are nothing more than the shadows of every other bird in existence,” the shadow raven told me.
And then he paused.
I knew he was waiting for me to ask.
So I did.
“So what’s a raven?” I asked.
“A raven is the shadow of a crow grown giant-large beneath the promise of sunlight,” the shadow raven explained. “A raven is everything that a crow has ever dreamed of ever becoming and then some.”
He gave a sharp little flap of his wings in a style and a manner that could only be called smug.
“Isn’t that somebody you know down there?” Raven asked, sort of half-pointing with the tip of his right wing.
I looked down and all of a sudden I could see what looked to be some sort of a village growing up below me.
What the freaking heck was going on?
That village hadn’t been there before – or at least I hadn’t noticed it down there.
And then, with one strong beat of his wings the shadow raven swooped down towards the dirt. Actually, I think he stepped onto an invisible elevator. He plummeted faster than I could even think about.
I knew I couldn’t keep up with that kind of speed, so I just drifted down a little closer – thinking about autumn leaves and parachutes and those little tiny dust motes that always dance in sunbeams.
My wings worked – so far.
I looked downwards. I could see about a billion acres of gray sand stretching out below me. Further on I could see gray stone buildings cluttered about the sand like a small child’s building blocks.
The scene looked both primitive and modern at the same time.
As I got a little closer I saw smoke driftin
g up.
There was a figure lying in the dirt.
“Come on slowpoke, the last one to make it to the lunch box was hatched from a rotten egg,” the raven cawed out.
He swooped down past me like a jumbo jet in a drag race.
I flapped just as hard I could.
Wings or not, this flying business wasn’t easy.
As I got a little closer I could see what I’d been looking at from my bird’s eye view.
The figure was a soldier.
I could see the uniform.
It was my Dad.
My real Dad.
I knew that before I even got close enough to see.
“This is who you wanted to see, wasn’t it Teller-boy?”
My dead Dad.
I flew down just a little bit closer, deathly afraid of what the Raven was going to show me next.
And yet I was still not able to turn away.
Chapter Fourteen – Food For The Crows
No way.
This could NOT be happening.
All I had done was to make a single stinking wish to a stupid mountain god.
The shadow raven circled around my Dad.
Closer.
Closer.
At least I think it was my Dad.
Remember, I hadn’t seen him in about ten years, what with him being dead and all and mostly gone before that. And all I really had to go on were a few crappy photos in Mom’s photo album and the stories that she told with each of the photos. I mean, you don’t really remember things like how your Dad looks, if he dies when you are nothing but a teenager.
In fact – if it came down to it I don’t believe that I had actually seen my real Dad for any real length of time since I was seven years old.
Now let me tell you, at seven years old you just don’t really get much of a look at your Dad. All that you really see is just a big set of nostrils floating high above you. All that you really hear is a deep and lofty voice that floats every now and then and reminds you to “sit up straight” and “listen to what your Mother tells you”.
That isn’t all that much to go on.
“Come on, Teller-boy,” the shadow raven cawed out. “There is enough fresh meat here for the two of us.”
He landed on top of what was left of Dad’s chest.
It wasn’t all that pretty.
Especially after that baby carriage full of roofing nails had got done with it.
Dad’s eyes opened.
He looked directly at me.
“You have to tell…” he began to say – and for the life of me I swore that I was hearing my Stepdad Warren’s voice coming out of my dead real Dad’s mouth.
It was getting AWFULLY confusing.
And then the shadow raven beaked down into the chili-con-carne of what used to be my Dad’s chest and Dad’s eyes closed just as quickly as they had opened and he stopped talking like his tongue had been torn out of his mouth.
The shadow raven beaked down and tore something long and wet from out of my Dad’s exploded rib cage. I flew towards the shadow raven, trying to stop him before it was too late but it was WAY too late. The Raven smiled at me and I felt an invisible knife pressing against my brand new crow heart. I knew I had to be imagining the whole thing but I stopped breathing just the same.
I just hung there, hovering in mid-air, not even flapping my wings.
I don’t know if crows can do that.
“So, do you believe in monsters?” the raven asked me, with a long string of Dad dripping down all thick and gooey from his beak. “Do you, Teller-boy?”
I gulped.
I nodded slowly.
The shadow raven smiled and it wasn’t a nice kind of smile at all.
“Good,” the shadow raven said. “It is important to learn something new, every day. And even if you are lying to me – even if you don’t truly believe in monsters – you will, soon enough.”
Then the shadow raven reached out to me, caught hold and pulled me in and through his own self. It felt as if I were diving through the middle of the memory of a rain puddle. I felt wet and dry and hot and cold all at once.
I felt it all rushing in at me, all at once.
I felt that exploding baby carriage going off beside my Dad. I felt what HE felt like when that case of roofing nails tore through what he used to call his body.
I remember screaming.
I remember that shadow-raven leaning down and whispering something into the wind tunnel of my left ear.
I remember hearing the words but not knowing what each of them meant.
Because I was still way too busy screaming.
And then all of a sudden I saw half of Bigfoot – the top half of him anyway – leaning out in thin mid-air. It was like he was standing on a stepladder, leaning out through a hole in the sky. All that I could see was his big fuzzy chest and his head and his long arms floating there above me as he reached down towards me.
“Come here, kid,” Bigfoot said.
Then he grabbed me and pulled me clear out of my dream and into that hole in the sky that he was dangling out of.
Just in the nick of time.
Chapter Fifteen – Lies My Mother Did Not Mean To Tell Me
“It’s an awfully darned good thing that I got to you when I did,” Bigfoot said. “He almost had you r head turned clear around.”
I think I might have nodded in reply.
The truth was I couldn’t really be sure. I had come up out of that dream-walk screaming so loudly that it had taken Bigfoot and Coyote a full fifteen minutes of there-there, there-there, there-now-there to calm me back down to earth.
“So where did he send me?” I asked.
“Not too far,” Bigfoot replied, looking away from me like he didn’t really want to tell me the whole complete story of where Nanna Bijou had actually sent me to. “But you were very nearly far enough.”
Of course, Bigfoot might just have been trying to spare himself the sight of me crying like I was three years old and somebody had just broken my favorite toy truck – only I didn’t really care if anyone saw me cry.
I had just seen my Dad die.
I had felt the whole thing happen – just like I had died right there alongside of him.
I had felt it happen deep inside of me.
That was the worst part of it.
I couldn’t stop thinking about all those stories and lies people had told me.
“It would have had to be quick,” they always told me. “A blast like that and you’d be gone before you know it.”
Everyone that I knew kept telling me that – every time I turned around at the funeral and for weeks afterwards.
It was like the only thing that people seemed to want to talk about.
I’d be sitting down at the supper table and I’d ask someone to pass me the potatoes and they’d look at me and say – “Well, at least it was quick.”
Even my mother had stared me right in the eyes and told that lie to me.
“It had to be quick,” she told me. “When your father died. It was over suddenly. He didn’t feel any sort of pain.”
I don’t know who she had been trying to convince more with that single stupid lie – me or herself.
It wasn’t quick.
It wasn’t painless.
My Dad had felt every single stinking second of it.
Bigfoot kept on talking to me – the whole time I was lying there and shaking and crying and screaming. I could see his mouth moving but whatever he was saying the words kept bouncing off of my ears. I could still count, though – and as near as I could tell Bigfoot kept saying three single words – over and over and over.
Finally I heard what those three words were that he was saying.
“Are you okay?” Bigfoot asked – looking at me with a surprisingly deep concern spilling out of those great big sad Sasquatch eyes of his.
I almost wanted to laugh in his big hairy face
.
Was I okay?
No.
I was NOT freaking okay. I don’t even think I could spell okay if you shook out every single O and K and A and Y in the Scrabble game into my open right hand and pointed really hard at a dictionary.
In fact, I don’t think I was EVER going to be okay again.
Okay?
“Yes,” I finally said, just to shut him up. “I am okay.”
Because that’s what we do to people who we need to shut up – we tell them stories.
We tell them lies.
Just like the sort of lies that Mom had told me.
“You don’t look all that okay to me,” Coyote said. “In fact, you look about as un-okay as a person can get.”
“I don’t think un-okay is a word,” Bigfoot pointed out.
I give up.
That’s the thing about grown-ups – whether they’re human or coyote or even a Sasquatch. No matter what you say to them it’s NEVER the right thing. It’s like God reached down and created us kids and taught us how to speak in Swahili and then he had reached down again and touched every adult on the planet and taught them how to listen in Ukrainian.
Maybe God was an adult too.
Or else maybe he was just another story.
“I’m okay,” I repeated. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I am freaking okay!”
I was getting a little bit angry.
“I don’t think you are saying what you think you are saying,” Bigfoot said.
Which hurt my head a little just trying to listen to it.
“Okay – so I am GOING to be okay,” I said – which was a little closer to the truth.
“Is there anything we can do to help you get there?” Coyote asked. “Before you get any more of your kid-snot smeared on my fur?”
I didn’t have to think about that one bit.
“Yes,” I said. “There’s something HE can do.”
And I pointed directly at Bigfoot when I said it.
“What’s that?” Bigfoot asked.
“The one who did this to me?” I said. “That guy with the big black wings?”
Bigfoot nodded.
“I know who you mean,” Bigfoot replied. “I know his name. We don’t really need to say it out loud. I know just who you are talking about.”