by Tom Deitz
He tried harder…
Harder—his mind a blank except for that single desire. The septum flared within its crystal housing, writhing like red flame under torture, still revealing nothing.
Which was not good, when he desperately needed to know how Edahi and his companions fared.
There was but one thing more he could try, though it would cost him dear—yet there was no help for it.
Sighing, Uki reached into a second pouch and drew out a thin, finger-long sliver of black obsidian. His face did not twitch a muscle when he slid that sliver across the flesh of his palm, nor when he pressed his hand atop the ulunsuti and let it have its fill.
Long that crystal drank, and long the septum guttered like a torch thrust against a wall of oak planks.
And long the veils of sand and dust resisted, but at last they grew thin enough to show Uki what had raised them.
“No!” he whispered to the surrounding silence. Such a thing should not even be in the Lying World! No one there would know what to do with it.
He could not go there himself, for his responsibility to Walhala had to take priority.
But maybe he could still send a warning.
PART I
Signs and
Portents
Chapter I: Watched Pot
(five miles south of Whidden, Georgia—Tuesday, June 17—noonish)
“Oh, go ahead, I reckon,” the waitress grumbled in the lazy local drawl that seemed to grow slower the closer to the coast one got—exactly like the maze of rivers Calvin and his friends had traversed on their trip up I-95 from Cumberland Island that morning. She was perhaps sixteen—probably this year’s crop of high-school juniors—and passably pretty, if a bit chubby. Understandable, given the fare her place of employment specialized in, which was fresh, deep-fried seafood. “I’ll have to watch you, though—an’ you can only talk until somebody needs somethin’. An’ it’s gotta be collect,” she added with an air of tired finality that was depressingly at odds with her youth and did not bode well for a remarkable future.
Still leaning against the white-enameled cinder-block wall by the kitchen entrance where he had accosted the girl maybe a minute before, Calvin McIntosh puffed his cheeks thoughtfully and nodded his acquiescence, too tired to flash the dazzling white grin, the twinkle of brown eye that would have had most women eating out of his hand before now—never mind that he was barely twenty and didn’t look even that. “I just need to let somebody know I’m okay,” he reiterated as neutrally as he could. “Anything else is gravy—or this bein’ the kind of place it is, maybe tartar sauce.”
His attempt at humor went right over the frizzy blond head, but left a confused frown and a grunt in its wake. His own black brows lowered in turn. Recalcitrance was not what he needed, not when he was tired as hell and had two days of absence to explain to his girlfriend up in Carolina—days when, as far as she knew, he’d literally fallen off the face of the earth…which in a way he had. He wondered if the waitress’s attitude was due to impatience (though he and his friends were the only customers at the moment), fear of reprisal for violation of “the rules,” or—as he caught his reflection in the round surveillance mirror in the corner—his appearance.
That last was a real possibility.
It was not that he was dirty, really—though he hadn’t had a proper bath in three days and had sweated through his black T-shirt on the ride up from the island (five people in an un-airconditioned ’66 Mustang for a couple of hours in the middle of June guaranteed that); and there was still a bit of sand clinging to his jeans from where he’d got them wet at Cumberland’s beach. But neither of those breaches of decorum was likely to raise eyebrows in a county as rural as this, especially in what was obviously not a four-star establishment.
What might give a teenage girl pause, though, was the haunted look on his face, the wildness in his eyes, that made his coppery skin and shoulder-long, jet-black hair seem positively alien when set against the present rather antiseptic enamel-and-vinyl surroundings. Up where he was most lately from, the combination practically screamed Cherokee Indian—which he was. He didn’t know what it proclaimed in backwoods south Georgia, but had learned from a year on the Appalachian Trail that a good first impression was important. And that was an uphill battle when you were part of an exotic minority to start with, never mind the complication of looking as scuzzy as he currently did.
“Phone’s up in th’ office,” the girl announced after another round of scowling consideration. “But keep it short, I ain’t supposed to let customers use it.” She spun around with a flourish and sashayed toward the bank of plate-glass windows that comprised most of the entrance wall of Whidden’s Steak-and-Seafood. Her rapid pace indicated that she didn’t care whether he followed or not.
Calvin marched dutifully behind, sparing a glance to the booth in the right rear corner where his companions were still puzzling over menus. The blond boy—his name was David Sullivan, and he was very probably Calvin’s best friend—whispered something to his septuagenarian uncle that produced a sharp cackle and a wiggle of white goatee. But then Dave noticed him and nodded his okay when Calvin pointed toward the half-wall of rough-cut pine that partly screened the office from the dining room at large.
“’Member, keep it quick,” the waitress reminded him as she ushered him into a tiny white cubicle that was dominated by a gray metal desk, an unmatching file cabinet, and a trash can stuffed full of defunct menus. A pile of Bon Appetites accented one of the desk’s front corners. The other supported an untidy stack of The Willacoochee Witness—and the phone.
The girl stationed herself in the open doorway and continued to glare at him as Calvin picked up the receiver. He ignored her and punched in zero, followed by a certain number in the wilds of the Great Smoky Mountains near Sylva, North Carolina, then informed the sleepy-sounding operator that he was calling collect and who he was.
The phone rang thrice, whereupon an answering machine clicked on: “You have reached Sandy Fairfax. I’m sorry but I can’t—” and then: “Hello?” The voice that interrupted was musical, soft, with a hint of mountain twang.
“Collect call from Calvin. Will you accept?”
“Yes, oh yes!” And then, with another click, he was through.
“Sandy?” he ventured tentatively, then: “It’s me—finally.”
“Calvin! Are you all right—is everybody all right?”
“Fine as can be, e’cept for bein’ tired and burned out. I could sleep for a week. We—”
“So where are you? Where’ve you been?”
Calvin frowned in perplexity at the hint of irritation coloring the much more obvious relief. “Didn’t you get my message? I left one on your machine last night.”
“Oops! Yeah, you’re right—though I’m not sure I’d consider ‘Am in Crawfordville, Georgia, and safe…mission mostly accomplished…headin’ south…will call again’ much of a message. Not when you’ve heard absolutely zilch for almost two days!”
Calvin rolled his eyes in resignation. Though she was obviously making an effort to hide it, Sandy sounded more than a little pissed. Still, he supposed she had a right to blow off a little steam, given that he hadn’t exactly sent her hourly reports about what had happened to him and his friends since they’d vacated her cabin Sunday evening—not that he always could have, since they didn’t have phones most places he’d been, never had and never would. But maybe he could have made a better effort…
“I can’t talk long even now,” he apologized. “I’m in a restaurant near some place called Whidden, Georgia—that’s north of Brunswick and south of about everything else, I reckon—but walls have ears, if you get my drift.”
“So,” Sandy sighed after a pause, “yes or no: did you save the World?” Wistfulness seemed to have replaced her earlier irritation.
“More than one actually,” Calvin chuckled wryly. “But, yeah—or it got done, anyway, though not the way we planned. Things went okay as far as Stone Mountain, in
the sense that we accomplished what we set out to. But Dave and me got separated from everybody else right after we rescued Finno and had to make an on-the-fly switch to—” He paused and glanced over his shoulder to see the waitress totally absorbed with her nails, which was probably fortunate.
“Uh…let’s just say it was that other place I go to sometimes,” Calvin finished mysteriously. “And then I wound up havin’ to go on another errand there, which I pulled off barely in time. And after that I had to boogie back here. I caught up with Uncle Dale last night—that was up in Crawfordville, where I called you from—but we didn’t touch base with Dave again until this mornin’. Things more or less came to a head near Cumberland Island—that’s where Alec and Liz wound up—but I only caught the tail end of the action. There was some semi-divine intervention at the end, but I’d probably better leave it at that for the time being. I—”
He paused once more, gazing out the window to watch a bronze Chevy Caprice with WILLACOOCHEE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT blazoned on its side ease into the parking lot. The driver glanced his way and continued staring as he executed a leisurely U-turn and headed out again. Calvin wondered if the guy could actually see him through mirror shades, tinted glass, and a plate-glass window.
“Calvin?”
“Sorry. Cop car just cruised by and I thought the guy was lookin’ at me. Just my old paranoia kickin’ in, I guess. You know how I am about bein’ unobtrusive.”
“That not real easy with your looks.”
“That’s why I like to avoid towns,” Calvin countered gleefully, “especially small ones. In the woods nobody’ll notice you, if you’re careful. Trouble is, folks’ve got rules and regulations all over every tree and vine, even in the parks, and when you’re a little bit different, they tend to get real antsy, so it’s best not to let ’em see you in the first place.”
“Which makes you paranoid, but we’ve had this conversation before.”
“Good point,” Calvin conceded. “Not the stuff to go over when you’re in a rush. Oh…thanks, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For alertin’ Dave’s uncle to what was goin’ on. He saved all our asses. Brought food, spare clothes, a bunch of campin’ gear, just in case. Even brought Dave’s bow, which I think he’s gonna lend me, since I lost mine.”
“Calvin, no! That bow was made in Galunlati!”
“Tell me about it!”
“You got any money?” Sandy wondered suddenly. “Just a fifty Uncle Dale slipped me on the sly.”
“Need more?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well, feel free to ask if you do; I’m in the phone book.” A pause while Sandy cleared her throat, then: “So what’re y’all gonna do?”
He hesitated. This was it, then: the hard part, the lead-in to the question he’d been dreading. “Well,” Calvin began finally, “I reckon they’re gonna ride back with Dale…”
“What about you? When’re you comin’ home?”
Calvin took a deep breath. “That’s…a real good question. I—” He cleared his throat in turn, and tried once more. “It’s like…well, it’s like stuff’s just gotten too weird, Sandy. And there’s a lot of things I need to think long and hard about. And…and I’d like to puzzle on ’em by myself for a while before I spring ’em on you and see what they do to the old Unified Field Theory of Cosmology. Shoot, I’m afraid I’ll forget ’em if I don’t go over ’em again real soon, ’cause they’re the kind of things folks don’t want to remember ’cause they’re irrational.”
“So you’re saying…?”
“That I’m gonna hang around down here a couple of days and try to get my head straight. Otherwise, it’ll be a seven-hour drive back to MacTyrie with the rest of the folks, durin’ which I won’t be able to concentrate worth crap, and then there’d be debriefin’ with Dave’s friends, and that’d eat up Wednesday, and then Gary’s gettin’ married on Saturday, and I can’t get out of that, seem’ as how I’m a groomsman, only the hoo-ha with that starts in on Friday—that’s when the rehearsal dinner and bachelor party are—and I’ll be up to my ass in all that stuff from then till sometime Sunday. That might give me half a day, and I need more than that—which means I won’t make it back to your house until Sunday at the soonest, I guess,” he concluded lamely. “Sorry, but I’ve just gotta have a couple of days alone.”
There it was; he’d said it, and he felt like a heel because he knew he really ought to hightail it straight back to Sylva and give Sandy the low-down on what had been going on, then recuperate there. But he simply couldn’t face another trip, not yet, not with so much weirdness in his head he felt like it was gonna explode.
“These…things you keep referring to,” Sandy ventured finally, and Calvin could sense her trying to conceal her hurt. “Do they have to do with…?”
He started to reply, then realized that a straight answer would make him sound like an absolute loon to the glowering door-warden, who was now giving him quite an alarming scowl and pointing meaningfully at her watch. His eyes quested vainly, came to rest on a pile of eleventh-grade textbooks atop the filing cabinet. “It’s got to do with…with geography and astronomy and mythology and biology,” he managed at last. “And with lycanthropy—a lot with that. I—”
“I understand,” Sandy broke in simply. And he knew she did.
“Thanks,” Calvin sighed. “You know I’ll level with you when I can.”
“I could come get you, then go to the wedding and meet these folks you’re always talking about…”
“Hmmm,” he mused thoughtfully. “Not a bad idea. Tell you what, I’ll try to find a pay phone and check back with you later in the day when I can talk freely. Deal?”
“Deal. Have fun on your Vision Quest.”
“It’s not a—”
A warning cough from the waitress drew his attention, and he glanced up to see her striding toward him, a look of grim determination laying the groundwork for future wrinkles across her forehead.
“Gotta go,” he finished quickly. “I’ll call when I c—” And then the girl touched the transparent button atop the phone and cut him off.
“Bitch,” he mouthed before he could stop himself. So much for good impressions, though apparently she didn’t notice. Girl had to make a living, too, he supposed; and it really was kind of sorry of him to upset her routine like he had. Still, he wondered what Little-Miss-Evil-Eye would say if he told her that this World wasn’t the only one: not by a bloody long shot.
More to the point, he wondered what she’d say if she knew she’d kept vigil not only over a Cherokee Indian, but also over one who just happened to be an apprentice shaman.
He grinned as he trotted over to rejoin his friends. He didn’t quite believe it either.
Chapter II: Inconveniences
(five miles south of Whidden, Georgia—oneish)
The sun was straight overhead in a cloudless sky and his shadow a puddle of black on the parking lot pavement beneath him when Calvin saw Dave’s brake lights flash on as he slowed what he called the Mustang-of-Death at the entrance to the main highway. He heard a final shouted “Bye,” and then the car passed from view behind a stand of scruffy magnolias, though the tired bellow of its exhaust persisted a moment longer.
And Calvin found himself alone outside an unremarkable restaurant in a south Georgia county he had never set foot in until that morning. It was hot, and there was no breeze; nothing to dispel the sharp tang of the nearby marshes or the sulfur-sweet smell of one of Union Camp’s papermills a little farther off to the southeast. There was only the parking lot, the scrap of highway, the unpretentious white cinder-block building, the surrounding loom of pine woods—and himself and his thoughts.
His thoughts…
Where did he begin? With the nature of reality maybe?
With the world as it really was? But if he got off on that now, it would lead him…
Nowhere, Calvin decided, and turned away from both restaurant and road, hoist
ing a borrowed blue nylon backpack across his shoulders beside the rather special bow Dave’s uncle had been thoughtful enough to bring along when he’d joined them. He had not gone three strides, however, before the pack straps began to chafe across his collarbones and tug at his unbound hair. He grunted and paused to resettle them, wishing there was more in it than a change of borrowed clothes, a small assortment of camping gear, a handmade Rakestraw hunting knife (also one of Dale’s lendings), and some rapidly mellowing McDonald’s biscuits. Comfortable at last, he fished in his pockets and produced a rubber band, with which he secured the bulk of his mane at the nape of his neck. Maybe that wouldn’t attract too much attention: lots of twenty-year-old south Georgia boys had black hair. Some of ’em even wore ponytails. But, Calvin reckoned wryly, that was about all he had in common with the local lads. He took a deep breath and marched, with deliberate precision, into the forest.
*
An hour later Calvin had begun to suspect that the overland route was a bad idea, at least as far as speeding his quest for a pay phone. An hour along open highway would probably have put him in Whidden itself, had he any intention of going there, which he did not. Instead, he’d spent most of his time threading his way through close-grown groves of live oaks, circumnavigating spiky clumps of saw-toothed palmettos, peering through endless tendrils of Spanish moss, and beating off armies of gnats. It was hotter than ever, too, because there was no wind. And sticky. Still, he took some solace from the coolness of the ground under his now-bare feet, and the caress of sunlight across his muscular torso. For a time he’d considered stripping naked and navigating the woods the way Kanati had made him—but that would probably have been pushing his luck and local tolerance a little too far. Calvin did not want to make waves; not even a ripple. Complete invisibility was his (so-far-unattainable) goal, but he’d settle for being unobtrusive.
And then he came abruptly to the edge of the forest. Before him was a narrow ditch full of rancid-smelling black water and cattails, then a yard-wide strip of sand, beyond which a two-lane road widened into four—he supposed in anticipation of entering the yet-unseen metropolis of Whidden, which a white-and-green sign now promised to be a mile away. Could have fooled him, he thought wryly. The only signs of civilization were the road, the odd beer can among the browning stems, and the distant whoosh of a semi. There were more woods across the highway: still the ubiquitous pines. And a Magic Market.