by A. L. Knorr
Residual Aileen left Cormac to his gardening. Cormac and Mailís both watched her go, one with concern on his face and the other with ugly jealousy. Cormac bent his forehead to rest on the backs of his hands on the top of the hoe and I thought he might be praying. The poor man had just lost his brother. I wondered how long before this scene had the one on the road taken place. Maybe it had even been the same day?
Mailís's eyes tracked Aileen's departure long after she'd stepped out of the residual scene. Hands balled at her sides, Mailís marched out of the trees. She crossed the property and said something to Cormac, who turned in surprise. Her claw-like hand was already lifting as he turned, and the scene continued where I'd entered it first.
I watched the entire thing unfold one more time, dread freezing my blood as I thought about what this could mean. Mailís was going through the process of becoming a Wise, just like me. A Wise was gifted with the power to heal and nourish life, so how had she managed to use her ability for something so shockingly the opposite?
When Mailís bounced off the invisible wall and the residual reset itself, I lowered my hand and dropped the ashy dirt back to the ground. She hadn’t gone missing, she’d become trapped here. The residual faded away as I dusted off my hands, but I couldn't entirely rid my skin of the awful stain it left behind.
Calmly, I took out my phone and dialed the house.
"Hello?" Jasher answered.
"It's Georjie," I said, my eyes on the dark house, worry for the man inside writhing in my guts. "Can you meet me at the O'Brien place? Now. It's important.”
Chapter 31
While I waited for Jasher, I wandered into the ditch and plucked a crab apple from one of the cluster of trees along the side of the road.
I looked down at the shiny red fruit, and all of its mineral and vitamin content became information that fed into my skin. I could heal scurvy with this fruit, and bladder infections, and athlete's foot, and a host of other diseases. I held the apple, balancing it on the ends of my fingertips. I pulled the nourishment into me, feeling the love between the properties of the fruit and my body. I gazed at the fruit with affection and it seemed to gleam in response. It was full of super-powered water and bursting with nourishment. I could draw resources from the apple without hurting the fruit itself, but I was taking from it with love and appreciation. What if I took from a place of malice instead? What would happen to the apple then?
I purposefully turned my thoughts to Liz. I thought of how she'd distanced herself from me after she’d made partner, the new and prestigious role in her life gradually taking my place in her affections and attentions. I thought of how she hadn't even tried to hide that she wanted me gone for the summer, how it would be easier for her if I wasn't there, then how she'd changed her mind when it was convenient for her. I thought of how she had her secretary take care of my personal stuff - booking my doctor's appointments, chauffeuring me around before I'd gotten my license, sending me reminders about tests and deadlines coming up. I released all of the anger, betrayal, and feelings of abandonment that I usually kept tightly sealed up in a watertight compartment.
I sucked the nourishment out of the apple again and this time, it began to shrivel. The skin wrinkled and dried up as its life drained into my fingers. It was so easy. So unbelievably easy. A cocktail of negative emotions filled my heart and my healing powers turned deadly. I narrowed my eyes at the Liz-apple, and kept pulling. Deep folds appeared as I drained the moisture. The apple puckered in on itself, turned brown. I didn't stop until it was nothing but a dried out, brittle core. A tear slipped down my cheek and I brushed it away. My chest heaved and my heart pounded. Another tear fell.
What became of a Wise when she used her abilities for taking instead of giving? For killing instead of reviving? Nausea twisted my stomach and made my mouth water. A small, niggling sensation pushed its way through the nausea. It felt as if something was vacuuming my breath from my body and sucking at my face and forehead. Terrified, I stopped draining the apple. My breath came in pants, but the sick suction-like feeling passed.
I was angry with Liz. But I didn't hate her, I loved her. In spite of the chasm between us, she was still my mother. I could easily desiccate an apple with the negative emotion I felt when I thought of her. So what could I do if I really hated someone? Mailís had demonstrated the terrifying answer to that question. Something Akiko had said to me once rang in my memory. You can't really hate someone unless you've loved them first. You might feel revulsion, or anger, or indifference, or any number of negative feelings toward a rude stranger, but hate was reserved for a special circumstance. It was reserved only for those whom we have loved, but who have betrayed our love at the deepest level.
"What are you doing?" Jasher's voice was full of alarm, and I started.
I hadn't even noticed when he pulled the truck over to the side of the road and parked it on the shoulder. He'd left the door open and come to stand near me. I had been standing there holding a desiccated apple and probably looking a bit stunned.
A warm hand touched my upper back. "Georjie, talk to me."
I turned to Jasher. Two more hot tears left tracks on my cheeks. His eyes were full of me. I squeezed my eyes shut and brushed away the tears. The dried out corpse in the garden flashed behind my eyelids. If Mailís was capable of that, then I was, too. We weren't any different. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to pass the powers I'd been given back to the fae, to beg them to take back their breath, to choose someone else.
But what came out of my mouth was, "We have to get your father out of there."
Jasher's face hardened, not at me but at my words. He turned toward the black dust, the crumbling house. I grabbed him inside the crook of his elbow, trying to hold him back.
"No, Jasher. Don't cross that line. Whatever has taken up residence in the space and is possessing your father, will possess you, too."
His eyes widened. With a big breath, he cried out, "Da."
Both of us ran until our toes were on the edge of the grass, and yelled for Brendan.
I nearly sank to my knees with relief when the front door to the house opened and Brendan came out onto the porch. He swayed unsteadily on his feet, and an arm flew through the air as a demon that circled him once disappeared into his shoulder.
"Did you see that?" I asked.
Jasher shook his head, but he hissed through his teeth. "No, but I don't have to see anything to understand that he's dying. I don't know what seeing me is going to do to him, though. He couldn't handle it even on his best days. That's why I haven't seen him in years. I knew he bought this place, but I never saw..." Then it was like something sunk into his brain. Jasher put cold hands on my shoulders and made me face him. His eyes were wild. "What do you mean 'whatever has taken up residence'? What has taken up residence here?"
"Mailís," I choked out.
As though in response to her name, black dust drifted up from the ground. I grabbed Jasher by the arm, squeezing tight.
"Da! Come to us, now," Jasher yelled.
Brendan shook his head like a dog who had heard something too high-pitched for his sensitive hearing. He staggered sideways and took a drunken step off the porch and onto the stairs, nearly falling down them.
Jasher's eyes were on his father, while I couldn't tear mine away from the gathering smoke and swirling cloud of dust. Brendan took a few more steps, tripped on the bottom step, and stumbled to his knees. Jasher surged forward again, and I fought to hold him back.
"Let me go, Georjie. He won't make it on his own."
The black dust condensed, and lost its transparency. It drew into itself and formed a shape, a pillar. Jasher saw it, too, and we both shrank back as a wraith rose from the dry place. Behind it, several bats emerged from Brendan, along with a keening noise I hoped I'd never hear again. It made every hair on my body stand at attention.
Jasher looked at me, his eyes wild in his face. "You know their names, Georjie. Call them."
I knew immediately
who he meant. The fae. Before I could stop him, Jasher took off across the dead yard towards his father. I stumbled as he yanked his arm from my grasp. Jasher sprinted across the yard, cutting around the darkening shape. As he passed the wraith, spectral black tentacles formed and licked out toward him. Jasher's back arched and he cried out as though whipped. He reached his father's side and slid in the dust like a baseball player going for home plate. Brendan was gibbering nonsense and began to swing at his son as wildly as he had swung at the bats. Jasher ducked his strikes while trying to haul his father to his feet. I could hear him speaking to his father in Gaelic. His voice was a strange hybrid of soothing and urgent.
The wraith grew bigger, with flashing black arms like ropes whipping out from its center. It had no real face, just a dense spindle shape with flailing tentacles like an octopus. The feeling snapping in the air was a hopeless despair and a desperate loneliness and regret. Not in my hearing but in my brain, I heard a terrifying screech. At a loss for what else to do, I began to call the names of the fae.
Chapter 32
Jasher and Brendan now both appeared drunk. An urgency overtook me – I needed to get them out of there. Immediately. The bats were having a heyday, dive bombing Jasher as well as his father, the smoky bodies disappearing and reappearing.
Despite the urgency inside that I help them, I stood my ground on the grass. I couldn't help them if I was overcome as well. The only thing I could think to do was call the fae. I called name after name from memory, beginning with the names from my dream. The oldest fae. In theory, the most powerful fae. Surely if anyone had the strength to beat back this wraith, it was those spirits of nature - they were the wraith’s very opposite.
Colored lights began to flash in my periphery, through the trees in the woods beyond the property. Relief made my limbs feel weak. They were coming.
The tentacles of the wraith had found Jasher and Brendan. Brendan was on his knees. Jasher was on his feet, but his body was bowed at an awkward angle, and an arm flashed out at the air, trying in vain to ward off the tentacles of the black specter.
I continued to call names, one after the other. The lights in the distance grew closer, and more joined from the ground, from the leaves. Even from the stones they rose. When the first of the faerie lights crossed the property border, I forgot myself and stopped calling to watch, expecting the wraith to shrink back into the earth.
But what was I seeing? The lights crossed the property line, sped up, hit the wraith, and disappeared in little clouds of colored vapor. My brain couldn't make sense of what my eyes were seeing. Were they going to attack her from the inside? My eyes fell on Brendan and Jasher. They were both on the ground now. Jasher's hair had begun to turn gray.
"No," I whispered. My veins felt as if they were filled with ice chips. It wasn't working. The fae looked like they were getting sucked in and destroyed. It was a void, an empty dry place where the fae could not live. How could it be that they were not stronger than it?
Before my very eyes, Jasher was losing weight. Brendan was already skeletal.
"No!" I screamed this time. I called more fae, frantically. Name after name I called, hoping that it would be sheer numbers that would defeat the black demon. More lights appeared from the woods, crossing the hills and valleys and twinkling, seemingly happy to come to my service.
But it was in vain. They disappeared, one after another, into the black void, and without a sound. I stopped calling and took a big breath. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. “Stop! Stop, stop!” I yelled, “it’s a vacuum!” and the lights stopped flying towards the void. Anger and desperation filled me. I closed my eyes. I was going to have to fight, but how? These powers didn't come with an owner's manual.
One thing I did know was that I couldn't come from hate. That was how Mailís had turned out this way. I might end up just like her – a murderous wraith – if I let my fear and anger overcome me. I opened my eyes, and a cry tore from my lips. Jasher lay in the dirt. His once beautiful muscular forearm was propped up at his side. I could see the fine carpal bones through the back of his hand, and the hollow between the bones of his forearm. All of my ability to draw healing energies felt useless and I was running out of time. I had to get them out of there. I bolted toward Jasher, but as I reached the border between the grass and the ash, and leapt into the space above the dry place, the wraith hit me.
There was no warning. Nothing I had ever experienced in my life up until then could ever have prepared me for a hit like that. The breath was stolen from the hollow of my mouth and not so much squeezed from my lungs by compression as sucked out by vacuum. I left half my IQ hanging in the air where my head used to be as I flew right out of my shoes. I soared like I'd been lobbed from a catapult and hit Jasher’s truck broadside. My head whipped back and every muscle running from my right collarbone to my right ear stretched and then snapped. I heard a sound like a breaking carrot. I dropped to the ground just behind the front tire, a heap of unattached bones.
A high-pitched whine rang in both ears, and behind that, the violent shriek of the wraith, far away and fuzzy, like it had cotton stuffed into its windpipe. The tacky flesh of my lungs stuck together, and no matter how hard I sucked I could not draw breath. My body twitched with the effort.
I lay there for years. Faith and Liz grew old and passed on. Jasher and Brendan joined Cormac among the ranks of the mummified dead. Targa and Saxony stood at each other’s weddings, a space at their elbow that should have been mine. Long shadows of tree limbs overhead passed over my body a thousand times. Targa gave birth to a set of twins, while Saxony traveled the world. Akiko...
As I lay there feeling death's shadow cool my skin, my crippled organs pulsing weakly, I realized that I had no predictions for Akiko's future. Had I ever really known my friend? Hadn't I failed her, somehow, by not knowing her? And what about Liz? I had been so unforgiving, so rigid. I, who had prided myself on my compassion, had been so without compassion for my own mother. Jasher's face swam in my vision behind the clouds drifting across the sky. His eyes when he looked at Brendan were filled only with love, even after all the abuse he’d endured. If he could find it within himself to have compassion for his father, couldn’t I do the same for my mother? Shame burned within me.
Tears leaked from the outside corners of my eyes and tracked into my hairline. The tickles crawling over the fine hairs and pores drew me back to the present. My lungs finally relaxed enough for the vacuum to release and I sucked in a ragged breath and choked. My spine. My right kidney. Nothing was normal beneath the surface of my skin.
Move. Georjayna. Get up. They’re dying.
I coughed and panted. The pain was excruciating. But oxygen cleared my thinking like a heavy wind pushes clouds away from the moon. My head lolled and I saw the underside of the truck and the grasses on the other side. Plant life. If I could draw their energy to me... I threw an arm toward the green-filled ditch. My body rolled and my legs flopped out. I drew my legs up, bent my knees, and lay my naked soles flat against the earth.
Thick, ropy roots shot from my soles and down deep into the ground, ploughing through the soil, penetrating the topsoil and driving into the pedolith. The world exploded. Colored light lit every plant, every tree around me. My pain dissolved and broken-ness mended as knowledge poured through the soles of my feet, filled my entire being, and opened areas in my brain I never even knew were lying dormant.
A new sensation filled me, so powerful that I was sure that my hair was standing on end. My body unfolded toward the sky like a sapling, drawing nourishment from the organic matter beneath me. I grew and didn't stop. The truck and the dead land and the house shrank below as I became like a thick oak, huge and strong, with roots penetrating layers of subsoil and clay and humus, every strata offering unique rich and nourishing properties. I kept growing in both directions. My roots felt as though they had no end and the sun filtered life in through my skin.
Looking down, the wraith was a black smudge of smoke, and th
e ashen earth around it a sandy hole of putrefaction. Two men foundered in the gray ash, feeble creatures in peril below the giant sequoia that I had become. Odd, I thought. Neither the wraith who had been Mailís, nor the father or the son looked up at this massive redwood looking down at them.
Energy and nutrient-rich water pulsed through my roots and up through my limbs, into my organs and brain. Everything around me for miles was alive with life-force light. Every plant, tree, and shrub. The world had become a rainbow of shifting, pulsing light.
Beneath my roots and running straight to the left and the right of me was a bright white line of light. I had a sensation like swinging a big heavy head full of branches to look first left, then right. The white light shot straight as an arrow off to either horizon and was so bright that the light of it blotted out anything living in its path or erected on top of it. I squinted at its cool blue and yet bright-white light.
Way back in my consciousness, I heard a voice, so faint, like a bell sounding far away. It was Faith's voice.
...matrix of energy lines criss-crossing the earth...
My roots were deeply embedded in the white line of light. I pulled my attention back to the scene below me, feeling an urgency in the small people down there, people that I knew.
The hole of rot below had become nothing more to me than a tiny blight on the skin of an apple. The sort of dent you wouldn't even bother to cut out with a knife.
"Jasher," I said. A sound like thunder rumbled and rolled across the land. Was that me? I was too big, too powerful. Just the desire to be closer made my vision sharper and I narrowed in on the two dying men. Eight leafy vines shot from the soil and stretched toward Jasher and Brendan. Three of them penetrated the wraith and a distant scream filtered into my hearing. The green vines wrapped around the men, cradling them and lifting them from the mold-riddled sand. My vines. Like umbilical cords, they pulsed with the juices of the earth, feeding the men with healing nutrients from plants I sensed and selected from miles around. The men’s bodies fattened and fleshed out, their skin grew plump and rosy. I couldn't register expressions on their faces, they were blurred and seemed to communicate in a language I might have understood once. My vines settled them into the grass and the two men landed on spring-loaded, energy-filled legs.