“Much as I’ll ever be.” I lifted my shirt to expose my belly, and braced myself.
Tamar used a fresh alcohol pad to wipe down all the skin around my navel, checked my face, then bent down and lined up the needle. I sucked in a tight breath as she pushed the needle with care through the delicate skin at the upper edge of my navel. She drew the thread through. It felt weird, the fiber moving through my flesh. She tied off the thread in a series of knots, alternately counting and muttering some incantation, and then slipped the needle off and pinned it into her sleeve. She held up the long end of the thread to show it to me, and gave an exploratory couple of tugs. I felt my skin pulling, laced with a sharp little pain.
“This’ll keep you linked to your body,” she said. “If we need to bring you out for any reason, I’ll tug on it and you’ll feel it, so get your ass back here. If you need to be pulled out, you’ll find this thread on your spirit body as well. Tug it and I’ll help bring you back.”
“I’m ready,” I said. “Let’s get this thing started.”
I settled back onto the towel, which Cherry and Tamar had hastily adorned out of their combined knowledge. Everyone settled in a circle around me. Tamar knelt holding the thread that served as a stand-in for my spirit umbilicus, and gave me a nod and a quick wink. Joe sat cross-legged on the other side, tense and grim. Cherry knelt to Tamar’s right, tending the little dish, to which she added the dry earthy-smelling clumps of mugwort as the smoke began to curl up. Her feline eyes were intense, her mouth twisted in concentration. And Sara sat across from Cherry, legs curled to one side, setting my metronome. Her eyes looked troubled. Tamar took up a brass singing bowl and struck it, running the carved wooden stick along the rim to prolong and shape the rich clear tone that sounded. She chanted a few syllables on a note that harmonized with the bowl, and the others toned along with her, each voice finding its own resonance.
I closed my eyes and let the sound ripple through my marrow, felt the swift ticking of the metronome in counterpoint to the beat of my heart, let the scent of the smoke fill my nose and make me dizzy. I felt safe with these people, and my muscles relaxed. It was like an ocean wave swept through me and carried me out to sea.
There was a moment where I felt a flash of panic and almost snapped back into myself, but I made myself take in a long breath through my nose and to exhale in a steady quiet hiss through my teeth, pulling that frantic energy as though I were winding it into a ball. This time, instead of trying to find that balance point between sleeping and waking like I normally did when I went into a trance state, I stayed awake and focused on relaxing even more deeply. I took the energy I gathered and moved it to a spot in the center of my chest, between my heart and my solar plexus. When my body had achieved that heavy-lightness, and all my focus was on the strong pulsing spot in my torso, I brought my sight down into that place, too. It was as though I were crouching down within my body to peer out of my chest.
It was something I remembered my Russian grandmother doing when we walked someplace unfamiliar or crowded, something that used to embarrass my mother. My Baba believed that the soul lived roughly in that torso spot, nestled under the heart, and that it served as an adviser. She also did something that she called “fuzzy eyes”, where she’d let her eyes go out of focus, and she’d walk in whatever direction that soul-spot pulled her, saying she was looking through the eyes of the soul. She used to say that having so many senses in our heads sometimes confuses our minds, and that the soul-spot would always take us in the right direction. If we were lost or turned around when we walked, she inevitably found her way in short order. Baba also used fuzzy eyes to find missing objects or pick out the right person in a group to talk to.
I thought of it as an extra chakra point of sorts, the place where Will and Desire are united and create a magnetic pull toward whatever it is you’re looking for. I used it now to keep my attention sharp and alert while seeking the place I wanted.
With an effort, and a couple of attempts, I separated the idea of sight from my physical eyes, and slowly opened my “eyes” while my actual eyelids remained closed. I was pretty sure I knew what I needed to find, even if I didn’t exactly know what it looked like. I was ready to search for it.
When I opened my spirit-eyes, I was in more or less the same place that my body lay, but just over the threshold of the physical. I could see my friends around me, but their voices had a faint hollow sound and the sight was blurry and distorted as though I were looking at them through a thick sheet of plastic. I sat up and then stood, careful not to look back at my own body lying there for fear that I’d panic and snap back into myself. I stepped away from my body and looked down at my navel, comforted to see the thread there, although it looked organic now and floated, shimmering with its own light.
I was fairly sure that this was some kind of lobby, neither here nor there. I looked down at the ground, my gaze moving along the path that the demon would have gone when he circled the tent last night, trying to see with fuzzy eyes. Sure enough, when I relaxed into it and didn’t strain to see, I could make out some kind of prints, dark smudges like scorch marks on the earth.
I followed them for several steps between the smeared edges of tents, and then they simply stopped. I looked in front of me, reached out my hands, trying to sense what was there instead of assuming it was empty space. I felt a bit of resistance, of solidity. Wherever the demon had gone, he had closed it after himself.
But that’s what I expected. After all, you wouldn’t just leave your front door at home wide open, would you? What was more important was that I had figured out that it was there. I doubted that this door was always here, in this fixed location. It occurred to me that maybe these different planes were less like countries with fixed locations and borders, and more like mobile homes, or perhaps traveling circuses. It made me wonder if it was possible for us to move our nearest “doors” to line up with the doors to other worlds to which we wanted to go.
I was really going to have to get another notebook so I’d remember to write these things down when I wasn’t, you know, hanging out on a demon’s doorstep.
The Sharpie that had been used to draw sigils on the towel was in my pocket. Or, its spirit essence was, I guess. The point is, I still had it and I was grateful. I uncapped it and lifted it up in front of me, feeling with my other hand for the solid spots.
I had rolled my eyes at Joe when he told me what to do with it. “You want me to do what?” I’d cocked an eyebrow at him. “I know you’re not thrilled with this plan, but for fuck’s sake, can you take it seriously and not screw around?”
“I’m not!” He’d been huffy, as if it wasn’t completely ridiculous. “This is totally practical. Remember what I said? I do what works. I don’t question the source.”
“This is cartoon logic,” I’d protested.
“Just try it, all right?” Right after I gave my agreement in the form of a gusty sigh, he hadn’t been able to suppress a grin. “Besides, Bugs Bunny is a master-level chaos magician. Fight me.”
Well, it’s not like I had any better ideas.
So I found the solid spots, and I drew on them with the Sharpie. It looked just like I was drawing in midair, or perhaps more accurately on midair. I sketched in the simplest of doors, remembering to put hinges and a knob and to draw a lock below it. According to Joe, the passage was already locked to me. All I was doing was putting in a physical representation of it that I could work with.
When I was done, I took my key from around my neck. I didn’t know if it would open any otherworldly door, so I’d used my intention to create a lock that my key would fit.
I wasn’t sure if it would work, but it did. I felt the click and yield of tumblers moving, and then I was pulling a door-shaped piece of blurred reality open to reveal the same world, only much sharper and clearer, beyond it.
I moved over the threshold and looked around. It was my world, but different.
It looked...arranged. Staged. A version of Morph lay before me that was so accurate that the fact that it wasn’t really Morph made my skin crawl.
It didn’t help that it was so quiet. There was none of the ambient noise that there should have been. And then I realized that I wasn’t seeing people--or at least, not human forms. There were presences here, presences that seemed oblivious to me. It was kind of like I was seeing them through a spiritual X-ray, and they didn’t all look alike. Some of them were like blobs or patterns of light and color. Some resembled animals or had some kind of creature aspect. Some were blurry and indistinct. Some were elemental, or smoky, some mere shimmers like heat rising from pavement. I couldn’t stop looking at them, but I was afraid to brush against any of them.
I wasn’t sure where to go, now that I was here. I wandered around a little bit, noticing that energy clung to certain structures, winding vinelike around tent poles or dripping off roofs like heavy Spanish moss; and I could see the genii of some of these spaces, spirits that resembled the places they guarded.
Something caught my eye, at the edge of my vision. I looked up, and realized that the dome of the heavens seemed to fade off into shadow. Below it, the sky itself looked slightly irregular, like a piece of it jutted out further than the rest. I walked over until I guessed that I was below it, and thought for a moment.
Tamar had advised me not to limit myself to thinking I could only do what I could do in the real world. Like a lucid dream, she’d said. I paused to consider what I’d do if this was a dream I’d woken up inside, and studied that oddness about the sky.
Well, I’d climb up and take a better look, of course.
I held up my hands, waving them around in front of me and then grasping, my hands shaping as they would around a ladder’s rung. I lifted one foot and intended it to land on another rung, and then I mounted it, feeling with hands and feet to move upwards, and not letting myself think too much about the fact that I was effectively floating in midair. That wasn’t going to help anything right now.
Up, up, up I went, and at last I found myself reaching a ledge. The sky did bulge outward here, because there was some kind of balcony or overhang, as if the front and underside of it had been painted in trompe l’oeil to match the sky.
I climbed over the ledge and stood on the overhang. It was a wide spot swelling out from a walkway that snaked in either direction. I looked down at where I’d come from.
Morph lay sprawling out below me, teeming with the life-shapes of all the people there. It reminded me of a zoo or an aquarium. The kind where habitats are painstakingly re-created to make the animals feel at home, where the visitors are able to observe from platforms and bridges and walkways. That thought, even though it gave a context to the place, didn’t make me like it any better.
There was something on the railing here. I moved closer to it. A handprint, red and wet, curled around the rail.
This was the demon’s realm, it had to be. Or one of them, anyway. I had no idea how widely demons could travel or if they could live in multiple places. It seemed rather desolate here, and I wondered if anything else actually lived in this realm. Or whether it was even the kind of place where anything would live. Maybe this was just a place for observing. And collecting.
Okay, enough of that line of thought.
When Sara had talked about how convenient it would be for us to find the equivalent of a stalker’s secret room full of pictures and items related to their target, it had occurred to me that if the demon was hanging around here, he had come from somewhere. And most likely, he was spending time close by but not within my world. I suspected he needed somewhere to retreat to in between appearances; I knew that a spirit being present in a physical realm was taxing.
That’s when I thought that maybe if I could move between the worlds with more direction and intention than my usual wandering, and if I had my friends helping me and lending me their strength, that perhaps I could track the demon somehow and find the spot where he was crossing over. I hoped there would be something about his realm or within it that would lead me to his victim.
I picked a direction and started walking. I wondered what I’d do if I encountered something hostile. Of course, I could always tug on the thread at my navel, and Tamar would pull me out. But if I needed to defend myself, would I be able to?
For the moment, there wasn’t anything threatening me, just a sense of wrongness and foreboding in the thick silence. The section of the walkway that I was on, moving away from the overhang, seemed to penetrate the sky and became a tunnel. It was dim, with seeping purplish light that barely let me see ahead of myself. The walls and floor seemed...fibrous. Organic, in a way that they shouldn’t be. My feet made no noise as I moved. I thought of walking through a huge capillary.
I emerged into a wide empty area with a ceiling so high that it was swallowed in shadow. On either side of me, the walls were clear and I could look out into the Morph-habitat almost as though I were outside in it. Around me were the art installations in the center field. The life essences moved around, and I could make out some of their interactions, or tell what they were doing, just from how they moved or where they were. I realized that the essences weren’t static. I could see subtle changes in how they appeared, and it was possible to interpret shifts in mood, or reactions to encountering a particular person. I was seeing into their spirits. It was fascinating, but it also felt invasive. Eavesdropping on something that none of them could hide or control. I thought of the demon standing in here, watching, maybe for hours; if I could pick up on so much so quickly, how many secrets would be revealed to his ancient gaze?
And he did know deep-buried things. I remembered lying in bed, so many years ago, on any of the many nights where the world felt angry and unforgiving and I was suffocated with a sense of doom. Remembered huddling with the covers pulled tight around me like a mystical shield, legs curled up against the ache of fear and despair in my gut, wishing for something to make it all right. How I had longed to turn on a light, but feared what I might see if I did. In the night there was the rustling of wings, the buzzing of flies. And then in my head, a whisper that was like a saw rasping on old bone.
I watched you stand in front of the mirror and hit yourself until you cried. I know that the boy you’ve been mooning over asked you to set him up with your friend instead--but you already knew you were too ugly for anyone to love. Remember last week, when you couldn’t make yourself take a shower, and you were on that crowded bus and heard those girls laughing about how someone smelled awful? How disgusting.
So many secrets fired like arrows into my soul, until I’d bitten down on my hand against the pain of sobs too deep to wrench free.
I trembled and shoved the thoughts away. Even after so many years, it still hurt like a knife to the gut to remember the lonely, outcast girl I had been and how much she had suffered. There’s a feeling of shame and violation when someone speaks the things you pretend don’t exist--the inappropriate reactions, the little embarrassments, the dumb mistakes, the pathetic moments. There’s a reason it’s part of the social contract to politely pretend you don’t notice someone quickly zippering a wide-open fly. It’s a sickening feeling, to have those moments noticed and pointed out. I quickly turned my gaze away from the big glass walls. I didn’t want to stare at others’ open flies.
Of course, if I didn’t, it was going to make it a lot harder to find the person I was looking for.
I walked onward. Maybe there would be something else in this place that would help me sort through all the many possibilities at Morph. The silence was oppressive. It was like being at a mall or museum after it closed, places that feel sinister when empty of all human presence.
That made me pause. Was that what I was sensing? Was this a place that didn’t belong to this demon, but only one that he was able to use? Was it meant to be filled with beings of some sort, for better or worse?
If that
was the case, then why would it be empty? Perhaps it had its own schedule, maybe a cycle of seasons, or maybe even something so simple as night and day. Maybe it was made for some purpose and it wasn’t populated when it wasn’t being used.
It seemed like a place for observing my world and entering it. I thought about my theory that realms might not occupy a fixed place, but might move and settle as needed. So maybe it didn’t exist to overlook the area that Morph occupied, specifically. Maybe it was a place for observing, period. Like a surveillance van. I thought of the disturbingly organic tunnel I’d emerged from.
Maybe this place was empty because it was as much a being as a place, and it was sleeping.
Or dead.
The demon’s obsession, from what I knew, was scavenging the souls of people he’d targeted when they died. Why should he be limited to the souls of human beings?
If he needed a temporary refuge from which to observe Morph uninterrupted, someplace with a doorstep that could be placed right inside Morph for an easy way to cross into the physical plane, and if he only needed it for the few days of his victim’s crossroad, what better place to occupy than a realm whose essence he could claim for his own as it died? Even if he wouldn’t physically kill his human victims, the rules of non-corporeal beings might be different. Maybe claiming the spirit of this place made it possible for him to use it, or gave him power to move around in the physical world.
I felt sick, but my instincts blared when I thought of it. Somehow, yes, I was certain that I was walking around inside the corpse of a realm.
That right there was enough to make me want to yank on my umbilicus and get the hell out of this horrible place, and I even had my hand on my navel. But I steeled myself. Reminded myself that Rosa Vermelha said he couldn’t do anything to me while I was under her protection. And I was here to find out who his victim was. I couldn’t just run like a little bitch without even trying.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 15