“What are they going to do for her?” said Sara. “She didn’t want to go, and they’re not going to be able to fix what’s wrong.”
“They’ll make her comfortable.” The look in Cherry’s eyes, the set of her jaw, dared us to argue. She seemed older, resigned to hard truth. “Better than we can. That might be all anyone can do at this point. It might be--we might be out of time to get any other answers.”
Around us, Tamar and Joe and Dionne were stirring and listening.
“She’s right,” said Dionne. “Maybe they could give her a little more time, with an IV. If not, they can ease her passing. After everything this place has been through, we do not want to make this event deal with the mess of calling in the authorities to take out a body.”
“We can’t.” I put a protective hand on Vivi’s arm.
Tamar’s voice was gentle but unyielding. “Mari, I know this is hard--”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I mean we can’t. When she--goes--the Hungry Man takes over. If she’s in a hospital full of people? In a populated town?”
“Shit. Mari’s right,” said Joe. “She becomes a supernatural Typhoid Mary.”
“So what then? We just let her suffer? Haul her body off to the middle of the woods somewhere and hope for the best?” Cherry crossed her arms.
“Well, this camp ain’t any safer if she dies here,” said Dionne.
Sara lowered her voice. “Can we stop talking about Vivi dying right here in front of her?”
“Here’s what we do.” Tamar chewed her cuticle. “We bring my van in. Put one of the air mattresses in the back and put her in there. Park it out in the shade, lock it and ward it. One of us stays with her at all times and takes care of her. If she goes, it’ll hold her until we figure out what to do next. With luck, we’ll get a better option before then. Agreed?”
None of us could object.
We were all quiet as Tamar left to get her van. One by one, we gathered around Vivi, each of us touching her in some gentle contact as if we could infuse her with enough of our own life to wake her. A handful of breaths, a song’s worth of heartbeats, the electric crackle of thoughts and will jumping from synapse to synapse. The dimness enclosed in the heavy canvas walls felt like a lantern turning down, down, down until it extinguished.
My heart and stomach squeezed inside me. Cherry lay with her head close to Vivi’s, just watching her. Joe had his back to all of us. Dionne scrubbed a hand through her short hair and sniffed, letting her cheek come to rest in that hand. Sara stroked Vivi’s hair and hummed a tune I couldn’t make out.
It was unbearable, but I didn’t want it to end. When Tamar came back, when we lifted Vivi’s frail form into the van and locked her in, it would be the beginning of the end. I looked at Vivi’s pale, drawn face. I barely knew this woman. And yet--I thought of her smiling at me over plates of barbecue. Of her laughing as we all played in the moon bounce. She had opened her true self to me as we sat out in the parking area, drinking coffee and watching fireflies in the tall grass.
I barely knew her, and that was the hardest part of letting her go.
Tamar came back. She and Joe carefully lifted Vivi together and tucked her into the makeshift bed in the back of the van.
The rest of us watched them drive out to the parking lot until the van passed out of sight.
Cherry made coffee for us.
I was restless and didn’t know what to do with myself. I was a rumpled, grimy mess, but I didn’t feel like showering yet. I had things to do, but I kept getting lost in my thoughts. Other Free Radical folks milled around as breakfast got prepared. I moved away, irritated by their noise and movement, by the sidelong looks and the whispers as they stared at me. The mooch who kept invading their camp and hogging their campmates.
Dionne put a steadying arm around my shoulders. “Wanna walk?”
I just nodded, wondering how it was that she seemed to hold it together so well. I felt about one loose thread away from falling apart.
It was starting to get hot out again as the sun got stronger. The packed dirt road as we walked it was hardening from spongy mud into dust. Without discussing where we were going, we’d started heading toward the back of the camp in the direction of the fairy circle.
I remembered something. “Do you know sign language?”
“’Fraid not. Why?”
“Someone here must, right? In a whole camp full of social justice hippies?” I surveyed the field of tents beside the road. “My friend Charlie. His spirit appeared to me this morning before he--moved on. He signed a message. It seemed important.”
“I’m good with a detour.”
People were going to remember me as the weird girl who kept asking for random stuff, I thought as I wove among tents asking anyone I passed whether they knew sign language. I supposed there were worse reputations to have.
It was when I came to my own little neglected tent and saw Teo and his crew at their camp next to mine that I lucked out. He waved me over and offered me some coffee, and when I instead asked him about sign language, he perked up. “Oh yeah, my buddy Antonio knows some. Antonio!” He waved one of his campmates over, a tattooed guy with a mullet and the sun-baked look of a construction worker.
“Yo,” said Antonio.
“Hi,” I said. “Can you tell me what this means?” I closed my eyes and pictured that last encounter with Charlie this morning. I did my careful best to repeat the gestures he’d shown me.
“Huh,” said Antonio. “That’s weird.”
“What is?” I had the sinking worry that I had remembered it wrong.
“Just that it doesn’t make no sense. ‘Real name church hide’.”
I lost my breath. Charlie, making a ziggurat shape with his hands. Pointing to the center of camp. “Church-- could that be ‘temple’, that sign?”
He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess. If you couldn’t remember the exact sign, maybe.”
Without thinking about it, I threw my arms around him and hugged him. “That’s fantastic. You’re fantastic. Thank you!”
“Sure?” He patted my back awkwardly. “Glad to help?”
He ducked back to the breakfast table, and I held out my arms to Teo too. He hugged me back. “Thank you, Teo.”
He gave me an extra squeeze. “Everything seems better this morning, no? Kinda normal?” He looked between me and Dionne.
“It’s better, for sure,” I said.
“All you from the thing last night, you should come have drinks with us at happy hour.” He lowered his voice. “We should toast, right? Even if not everyone knows why.”
“We’d love to,” said Dionne. “We all need some celebrating.”
“Six-thirty,” Teo called after us as we set off toward the back of camp again.
“Okay.” Dionne waited until we were out of earshot. “The hell does ‘real name church hide’ mean? You seem to know.”
“I think so,” I said. “I think Charlie was trying to tell me that Murmur’s true name is hidden in the temple at the center of camp.”
Dionne laughed. “You mean like Tamar said it definitely ain’t?”
“Think about it, though. His true name is powerful for him. Wouldn’t it make sense for him to put it somewhere here so it would be close to him during the fight, but not on him? I confronted him on top of the temple when I saw him up there.”
“You what now?”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, what if Charlie’s right? What if he saw something? What if we could find his true name? Rosa said we had to have that if we wanted to stop him for real. This could be our one chance to do it.”
Dionne ran both hands over her face and across her hair. “Girl, I’m beat. So’s everyone. You look like shit warmed over. We took him down last night, and that’s gonna hurt for a while. He’s gonna need to hole up and recover. And that means
we got time to deal with that poor child back there before she dies, all right?”
“I know. I know we need to help Vivi first. But after that? If he’s weak, it’s the best time to go after him. We could--bind him, shut him down, whatever it is we do--and keep all of us safe from him. Keep the world safe from him.” I remembered his threats. I am patient. And I have eternity. I shuddered. “If I had his true name, you’d know what we had to do, right?”
“Sure. I mean there are bindings. But they don’t last forever. They break down sooner or later.”
She wasn’t looking at me when she said it. I was sure there was something she wasn’t telling me. But I just said, “Okay.”
“Let’s just focus on getting that poor girl some help, right?”
We arrived at the fairy circle. I noticed that it was already starting to lose strength. The heather was wilting, the heat-wave-like shimmering in the air fainter than before.
I realized I should have brought some kind of cake or honey offering, something to lure one of them out. As it was, all we could do was wait for something to happen.
Luck was with us. Before long, there was a rustling in the brush nearby. They must have posted lookouts. Sure enough, a loud strange bird call cut through the air, and a few moments later, Boden emerged from the heather, staying within the circle. He still wore the cheap mask he used as the basis for his human guise outside the circle, but he was in his native form.
“Are you here to complete our deal?” he asked.
“Soon,” I said. I was aware of Dionne’s disapproving glare burning into the side of my face and I avoided looking at her. “First I need to know if any of your kind have learned anything yet about the antidote to the hungry grass.”
“We spent the remainder of the night questioning the nain rouge,” he said. I was pretty sure I knew what ‘questioning’ meant in this case. “One of my clan was also able to bring back some details of the method for unmaking the grass. The reason it is so difficult is that the one who makes it puts something of their self into it so that only they may reverse it--some kind of phrase they speak.”
“A verbal key.” A tiny bright pop of hope pulsed in me. “He gave you the key?”
“No,” said Boden, and my heart sank. “But we also learned that the words themselves do not matter. Looking only to the words themselves is simply another sort of encryption to protect the spell. What matters is the voice--and that, we were able to compel from him.” He held up a small vial.
I shivered at what lay behind those words. “So you’re saying you can do it now? You can unmake the hungry grass?”
He nodded. “We can, and we will. When we are done, you will return here to the circle with us. We will have the item we need you to take across for us, and we will finish our deal, and when you return, you will close this circle so that we will be safe should anything linger here that would try to cross over.”
It was so simple. “So Vivi will be okay?”
He tipped his head and his large strange eyes through the mask’s eye holes were full of pity. “We can unmake the grass.” He spoke with as much patience as if he was explaining it to a small child. “It will no longer be able to claim other victims or spread its poison. But the One Who Hungers walks inside the skin of your friend. That is not a spell to be undone. That is a banishing far beyond what knowledge we could seek in this short time.”
For a long moment I just stood there. I couldn’t parse his words. My nose tingled and I rubbed it hard. “She’s just...going to die? And that’s it?”
For what it was worth, he looked sad. “I am sorry. There is one thing that may help, a bit of lore recalled by an elder of our clan. It is said, she claims, that should the one who walks with that spirit lie down to die upon the grave where it began for them, then the One Who Hungers will pass back into that hungry grass at the moment of death. If you bring your friend there to die, we may unmake the grass immediately afterward, and no one else will be endangered by the spirit or the hunger.”
“That’s not good enough.” I rubbed my nose again, harder, and the hairs on my arm prickled. “Send more of your people. Find out who can help her. What has to be done. There has to be something!”
Dionne laid a hand on my shoulder. “Enough. You and I both know there ain’t time to do any more. Let’s focus on what’s left that we can do for her.”
Boden nodded. “Your friend is wise. Bring your friend to her resting place. We will gather what we need for the unmaking, and find you again. Together we will give her peace.”
The walk back to Free Radicals was one of the longest of my life. “I failed,” I said, as if I could punch myself with words. My leg under its bandages ached. I felt broken and small.
“Stop it,” snapped Dion.
“I just, I thought I could--”
“Shut up.” The edge in her voice cut me. “You think you’re the only one blaming themselves for that poor child? The only one feeling used up? I got nothing left to spend drying your tears and telling you, you did your best.”
“Fine,” I snapped back. I wanted to say more. I was pissed. But if I fought with her, she might not help me later, so instead we walked back with a hornet’s nest of silence between us.
It was a silence that spread to Cherry and Tamar when we got back and told them about it. Even the knowledge that we could unmake the hungry grass and remove that poison from the land wasn’t enough to rally us. I could see it in their eyes as they must have seen it in mine, that last ember of hope doused out.
Cherry and Tamar went out to the van to meet Sara and Joe and figure out how to get Vivi to the hungry grass without anyone noticing them carrying an unconscious body around, and to take down the wards around the grass. We’d keep people away ourselves until--the whole thing was done. Dionne unpacked a bag full of corks and said something about collecting all the spirit bottles that might have bogeys trapped in them.
We avoided looking at each other. I took the excuse to go check on my tent, mumbling about taking a shower. Really I just wanted to be alone for a little while. I sat inside my stifling nylon dome, staring at the messy jumble of my few belongings shoved off to the side where I’d left them. By this time tomorrow, I’d be packing them up, ready to move on. Who would pack up Vivi’s things? Where would they take those remnants of her life?
I didn’t have it in me to tell myself that unmaking the hungry grass was any kind of victory, even if it was better than leaving it there. But thinking about it reminded me that there was a body buried there, some poor forgotten soul who’d never been properly laid to rest. I wasn’t sure how we were going to deal with that, either. To be honest, it annoyed me that it should fall to any of us to do something about it, after all we’d done over the weekend. I just wanted all of it to be over.
Sitting there only made me feel worse. Helpless. There was one thing I could do, something necessary that might give me respite from grieving Vivi.
I left my tent and headed for the temple.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Around me, Morph enjoyed a beautiful day. The rain had tempered the weekend’s heat and left the sun-warmed grass fresh and softer. It was smaller now that so many had left, but there were still plenty of people in fantastic costumes or bright sarongs lounging, strolling, chatting, dancing, playing. That was something to feel good about, I supposed. We’d kept most folks from serious harm and ensured that they could go on with their lives as usual today.
As I neared the art installations at the center of camp, I saw Mr. Frosty directing a crew of volunteers hauling firewood for the smaller burns later tonight. I ducked around the back of a couple of DJ tents and hurried out to the edge of the field where I’d be hidden in the labyrinth of sheets around the temple. I didn’t slow down until I was well within it, just to be safe.
The temple loomed over me. By now, it was covered top to bottom in a rainbow of marker graf
fiti, countless messages and wishes and doodles from countless Morphers. I circled the base, scanning the ground for any hint of anything unusual. I went inside the bottom floor--it was just tall enough for a person to stand up in--and glanced around. There were a few people in there, everyone keeping a respectful distance to give each other privacy as they worked their piece into the bits of bare wood left between scrawls. Toward the back of the room, a thin wooden lattice hung an inch or two from the ceiling. Yellow paper stars dangled from it, tied with colorful cotton yarn, each star also bearing a name, a verse, a wish, a note. There was a bucket full of yarn strings and another with stars and pens.
There was nothing else in the room. The grass and earth of the floor was undisturbed. I brushed the stars with one hand, setting them swinging. Was Murmur’s true name hidden in one of them? Was it somehow imbued in the wood structure itself? I had no idea what I was looking for, or if I even had the skill to extract it if I found it.
I didn’t want to go to the upper levels, but I had to. The second level wasn’t too bad, since it had steps leading up to it. I kept one hand on the walls as I walked around it on the ledge, and I felt less uneasy when I went inside. This room had a few brightly-colored cushions on the floor and someone in a frog onesie sitting cross-legged on one, meditating. I left quietly.
The third level had a narrower ledge and a smaller room, only large enough for two or three people to crouch or sit. Its interior had fewer but longer and more elaborate things written and drawn on the walls, put there by people who had wanted silence and privacy for more personal pieces. I sat in there for several minutes, hugging my knees and reading the walls, more than anything to quiet my jackhammering heart and stop shaking long enough to force myself to climb the rickety ladder to the very top of the temple.
I couldn’t stand up when I got there. I stayed close to the ladder, my hands flat on the roof. The balloon arc soared above me, cheerful and festive against the blue sky. Murmur had waited for me here. Was it close to the location of his true name? I looked around myself, but there was even less up here. Just flat plywood, marked here and there with nothing that stood out to me.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 44