Stoneskin's Revenge

by Tom Deitz

  But there were other human smells here as well: three of them—two male and one female, all young. Forrest found where someone had poured colored earth on the ground in a pattern that, when he traced it with his nose, proved to be a circle quartered by a cross. A fire had been built in the middle of it, and there were a lot of unfamiliar odors there: oils and blood and resins. There was also a bit of food about—or the wrappers it had come in: candy bars and chips and—and the wild-smelling stuff he’d tasted only once before: deer meat. He nosed up the morsel, swallowed it, though it was sun-dry and someone had burned it and rubbed vegetable stuff all over it. Not as juicy as the rabbits he loved to chase that Master sometimes took him long distances to pursue, but sufficient to a stomach that had not been properly tended for over a day.

  Something else caught his attention then: a slab of brown leather. A poke of his nose flopped it open, revealing bits of greenish-white paper with pictures on them. He took it in his mouth, ran a dozen or so yards uphill to the largest of the boulders—and froze.

  Something wasn’t right. He could not fix on it, but there was definitely a wrongness here. He dropped the leather, raised his head, gazed around, hearing, sniffing, finding nothing to indicate what had made his hair stand suddenly on end.

  And then, unbelievably: “Forrest, yo! Forrest! Here, boy!”

  It was Master!—jogging out of the woods at the top of the hill and loping down toward him, his footfalls heavy on the ground. He was middle-sized for a man, stocky and dark-skinned, though not in the way most folks around here were, because his had a coppery cast. His hair was black like theirs, however, and closely cropped. The clink of metal accompanied him, from the tools that hung from his waist on another strip of leather. He smelled upset, and Forrest was ashamed he hadn’t noticed his approach. Why, the wind should have brought him the scent long ago! But he didn’t care now, because he was running and frolicking, and Master was running too.

  “Forrest! Hey, boy!” And then Master was upon him, kneeling down to reach out and fondle his ears, while Forrest nearly peed from joy, leapt up to put both front paws on the man’s shoulders, and licked him, tasting sweat and tobacco.

  “Where you been, boy?” But Forrest couldn’t tell him, didn’t care, he was so happy to be almost home.

  “Come here, boy, let me look at you!” the man continued. “Let’s get out of these weeds!” And with that Master picked him up and carried him over to the slab of rock, where he sat down with Forrest in his lap and began giving him a good going-over, muttering all the time about how he’d been afraid he’d lost his favorite beagle, about how some low-down sorry so-and-sos had smashed down the dog lot fence with a car, and how he hadn’t found out about it until just a minute ago ’cause he’d had to stay at the construction site he was working on all night and the boy he’d paid to check on the hounds hadn’t bothered. Soon as he got the rest of the pack rounded up, he was gonna call the cops, Master informed Forrest as he examined his ears for ticks (finding five), but he didn’t have much confidence in ’em. Maybe they could at least find out what kinda car had run through the yard, though, and use that for a starting place to chase down the culprit. All he could tell was that it had been a smallish one and had to have been red, from the paint he’d found all over the chainlink.

  “Hey, what’cha got there?” Master asked abruptly, freeing one hand to stretch across the stone toward the slab of leather Forrest had just been playing with.

  Still securing Forrest with his elbow, Master reached further, practically lying on his back across the boulder when it would have been a lot easier to get up and walk around, though Forrest didn’t care about that either, because it meant Master was more interested in him than a bunch of old dead cowhide.

  “Got it!” And then: “Well I’ll be damned! It’s my boy’s billfold! Must’ve been him that busted down my fence and left all this shit lyin’ round here.” Forrest felt Master’s heart rate increase, then slow back down as he stuffed the leather thing in his shirt pocket. “First off, though,” Master added more lightly, “let’s take a look at them footsies.”

  And then Forrest sensed it once more: that strange uneasiness. His hair prickled and danced all across his body. He still couldn’t tell what caused it, except that there was some sort of vibration in the ground, almost like the rocks were sliding along each other. He didn’t like it, either; not at all. He had to get away, had to warn Master…

  “Easy, boy!” Master cried as Forrest tried to struggle free, baying loudly in sudden alarm, then changing to the sort of whiny growl that was both fear and warning. “Hey, what’s got into you?”

  But Master held him firm, asking over and over what the matter was when it should be obvious, because something was wrong with the whole place here, something he couldn’t name because he had no name for it.

  “Shit!” Master hollered all at once, leaping to his feet. He dropped Forrest in the process, who then proceeded to run in circles around the stone, sniffing it suspiciously and whimpering. A sharp, bitter smell reached him from Master—the one that meant he was hurt or scared, but with it Forrest caught another, stranger scent: dry mud and sunbaked rocks and the briefest hint of fresh blood. But Master exhaled suddenly and chuckled, rubbing his hand along his side as if it itched. He picked Forrest up then, and started toward the house. “Boy, that ’uz a weird ’un,” he whispered. “Got the granddaddy of all great stitches in my side! Still,” he added as he increased his pace through a grove of trees Forrest recognized, “I reckon the first thing I gotta do is give you a bath and take you to the vet. See if you et anything you shouldn’t, or if anything ’sides ticks took a nibble outta you. Then I’m gonna call the cops.”

  They were in sight of home now: a line of fencing around the familiar low brick house, a long section lying flat along the ground. Forrest had expected that. But something wasn’t right! Master wasn’t walking as surely as he ought. He was stumbling, and Forrest could feel his grip growing weaker.

  They reached the fence, picked their way across the flattened part; and Master held onto him with one hand while he fumbled at the metal thing on the back door with the other. The door opened, and Master put Forrest down. He loped onto the linoleum-floored kitchen beyond, then turned around in alarm, ignoring the yips of his fellow refugees as they came up to renew their acquaintance.

  He was staring at Master. But Master hadn’t come inside yet; he was just standing there on the stoop, clutching his side, then suddenly ripping his shirttail up and staring at where something was hanging out there, right below his ribs: something reddish-brown and bloody.

  Forrest caught the odor of blood much more strongly, and with it the thicker scent of viscera—and then the bitterness of fear again, which came exactly as Master screamed.

  Chapter IV: Dreams and Visions

  (east of Whidden, Georgia—two hours before sunset)

  “Thanks again, guys,” Calvin whispered. “Thanks a bunch for your lives.” He licked his fingers and stared appreciatively at the prickly white remains of the last of the three catfish he’d hooked earlier that day, watched the westering sunlight play off the ribs and vertebrae, and contemplated their pearly beauty as if they were works of art. It was the right thing to do: to ask living things for their lives before pursuing them, and to thank them again when they laid those lives down in his behalf. Sometimes one even covered the blood, but that depended on the prey. The blood of these three fish, along with their innards and their heads, was already well on its way back to the earth—either that, or was food for turtles like the fine-looking grandpa snapper he’d spotted earlier when he’d taken a long cool soak in the creek on whose sandy banks he had made camp.

  “Like I said, guys, it’s been fun—truly your meat was delicious.” And with that Calvin laid the skeletons on the dull inside of a large magnolia leaf, rose from where he’d been sitting cross-legged by the tiny fire on which he’d cooked them, then deposited them back in the tannin-dark waters a foot beyond his bar
e feet. That done, he reduced the fire to steam and sludge with water from his peanut can, and—satisfied the flames would not incarnate again should he fall to napping—flopped back against the trunk of the vast live oak that over the past few hours had become a sort of surrogate for his rocker on Sandy’s porch.

  The view wasn’t bad either: the creek, maybe thirty feet wide here; the opposite bank a mass of live oaks and red cedars, their branches weighted with Spanish moss that dragged along the lazy water like fraying snake-skins—exactly like this side, except the trees were taller here and a little more widely spaced. It was a symphony of dark green and glossy brown—and of blue sky and metallic-black dragonflies. Vaguely melancholy, maybe; or perhaps that merely reflected Calvin’s mood.

  He was depressed—or so confused and perplexed he could hardly tell the difference. Three days in various Otherworlds would do it to you—too many things to rationalize all at once, too many snap decisions, too many preposterous things to accept without thinking them through.

  And for the past two hours he’d been trying to do exactly that and was making absolutely no progress, which was really starting to annoy him. That was what he was here for, after all. Elsewise he could be in a red Mustang riding up the road with his friends, or better yet, be on a bus on the way to see Sandy.

  Instead of getting eaten alive by gnats, which was yet another irritation.

  Answers? Ha! He still hardly knew what the questions were—except that they had to do with the nature of reality and the rationale behind magic, and how to reconcile the worldview he’d been brought up to believe in with one that was much more irrational. For he, Calvin Fargo McIntosh, was one of the very few people on Earth (as far as he could tell) who knew with absolute conviction that the World men saw was only part of what actually existed.

  His friend Dave Sullivan had been the first to learn the truth, two years ago, when he’d heard music in the night and followed it into the woods to discover that the Irish myths he’d lately begun to explore were based far more on fact than he’d ever suspected. For that night Dave had met the Sidhe—the Faeries—the old gods of Ireland—as they embarked on one of their ceremonial tidings. There’d been a contest of riddles between Dave and one of the Faery lords which had ended with Dave triumphant and possessed of a magic ring that protected him from physical intervention by the Sidhe. But Dave had quickly learned to his sorrow that it was not wise to make a lord of Faerie look foolish…

  Yeah, that was how it had begun; with Faerie—a land as real as this one, but all unseen, that lay upon this World like wet tissue paper tossed upon a globe.

  But there were other Worlds, too: the Lands of Fire, through which Dave had journeyed a year later; and the Realm of the Powersmiths, which bordered—at some distance—a country much closer to Calvin’s own heart.

  For beyond what the Powersmiths called the Burning Sea lay Galunlati: the Overworld of the Cherokee Indians.

  It was invisible, of course, hidden from the sight of men by what Dave called the Walls Between the Worlds, but in most other ways it was more or less like pre-Columbian North America. It had the same trees, for instance (though Galunlati’s were bigger and healthier); possessed the same wildlife—plus a few: passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets and great auks—and creatures that had been extinct longer, like saber-toothed tigers and mastodons and dire wolves. Calvin even had a friend there, an archetypal being called Uki, who was also his patron and a shaman of sorts, and had charge of the weather in the southern quadrant. (Not being a strictly spherical World, Galunlati needed help with things like that, which was one of the notions Calvin had a hard time comprehending.)

  The really remarkable thing, though, as far as Calvin was concerned, was that he alone of the Ani-Yunwiya had actually been there in modern times; uniquely among all his tribe, he knew that Galunlati was as real, as solid as the earth beneath his body or the bark behind his back.

  He had breathed its air and it had sustained him; had drunk its waters, tasted its food, and ventured to this World intact if not unchanged.

  But it was hard, dammit, to look at the World around you and know there was more than one. But doubly hard it was to accept that the laws by which one lived—the things you took for granted, like what Isaac Newton had worked out, or Einstein, or Steve Hawking—didn’t necessarily hold true everywhere.

  Like such basic concepts as what the World was made of.

  Science said it was all matter and energy, each shifting back and forth and all bound up in time. But where did that leave the less tangible things like spirit? Was consciousness only the interaction of chemicals and the flow of electrons? Or was there something more? Had there been a spiritual Big Bang as well as a physical one? Had God—for lack of a better word—once embodied all of spirit there was and consciously chosen Second One to fragment himself into an infinity of souls that slowly reconnected across the eons and became ever more conscious in the process, even as matter slowly clumped together into stars and planets? Would the End of the World—that point when all matter had rejoined and collapsed back onto itself—have some kind of analog whereby souls merged more and more and eventually united again into one Over-Spirit that encompassed all knowledge—that, indeed, knew everything that a trillion-trillion-trillion separate consciousnesses had ever seen and felt and understood?

  It was too much, too goddamned much.

  And that wasn’t even considering Power.

  That was what the Sidhe called it, and Calvin had picked up the habit from Dave, who knew more about it than anybody he had regular commerce with. Most people would call it magic—or maybe psi, depending on how it manifested. His tribe called it medicine, witchery, many names. But what was it? It was immaterial, but it could influence the material—in that way it was like energy. But it was born of sentience—though, apparently, it could also be conferred upon non-sentient objects the same way some substances absorbed water; which implied that all the other elements had to act or react to one another as well. Maybe they did. Maybe matter weighed down spirit. Maybe Power—magic, whatever—was the active principle to spirit’s passive one. Maybe there really were only two elements, matter and spirit, and each also had an active and a passive aspect: energy and Power, respectively. Or maybe…

  Calvin clutched his head, closed his eyes. No, dammit, he was still thinking like a white man—natural, given that was the culture he had been born into. Though at least half Cherokee, Calvin’s father had renounced his heritage, had tried to live the white dream as a high-steel construction worker in Atlanta. His mother’s blood was what he needed now: the World her medicine-man father had shown him before his death had made Calvin take to the road to find himself. He had to think like the Ani-Yunwiya.

  The premise of Cherokee magic was simple: there were classes of being that, very roughly, aligned with the four elements of air, fire, earth, and water. Four was a Power number: four directions, each with their totem color; the Four Councils Sent From Above. But things that were in more than one category, or that combined elements of more than one category—ah, that’s where the fun began.

  Which brought him to the uktena.

  An abomination, white men might have called it; a monster, though it was a natural part of Galunlati—or as natural as anything there could be. It looked like a vast, ruddy serpent patterned white down its back with blotches red as a coral snake’s red bands—except that it was hundreds of feet long and had horns. But it had once been a man, before Kanati, the Hunter God of the Ani-Yunwiya, enchanted it, so it was already in two categories right there. And it had horns like some kind of antelope, so there again it combined the characteristics of two classes of being. And its scales were hard as crystal—maybe were crystal for all he knew.

  Without really being aware of it, Calvin rested his hand on his bare chest and tapped the two-inch-long clear/white triangle that lay, entwined with silver wire and depending from a rawhide cord, between his pecs. Absently, he slipped a finger along the vitreous edge, care
ful not to push too hard. For, though it looked like a shark’s tooth, it was a scale of the great uktena he had helped to slay on his first trip to Galunlati, and it did strange things when it tasted blood.

  Like change you into an animal.

  Calvin knew: for he had himself been transformed that very way—into a ’possum—and had been lost in the ’possum brain until Dave had freed him. Since then he’d shifted shape twice more: both times into a peregrine falcon. He’d been more prepared those other times, but it had still scared him shitless, because he could sense, every minute, the avian consciousness hovering there waiting for him to drop his guard so it could take over. The best way to combat that, he’d discovered, was to make up songs, like the one he’d started jotting down on the yellow pages of the small notebook he’d bought at the Magic Market. “Werepossum Blues,” he was calling it: the whole long tale of how he and Dave and their friends had gotten tangled up in the politics of the Sidhe. It had another function, too: one darker and much more serious—but he didn’t even like to think about that, and certainly not now, when he was trying to come to terms with something much more imminent that frightened him to death on the one hand, yet tempted him almost past tolerance with the range of its possibilities on the other.

  He had determined, in short, to master his fear of skin-changing. And, he supposed, there was no time like the present to begin.

  Sighing, Calvin stood and slipped out of his jeans and skivvies—your duds didn’t change with you, and you could find yourself in quite a bind if you chose your new form badly. Fortunately his riverside sanctum was warm and secluded.

  Once naked, he lay down again, and took the scale in his left hand, adjusting it so that if he squeezed, the edges and the twin points at the root end would quickly bring blood. Now what did he want to become? It had to be something he was familiar with, something he could imagine. It also had to be something he’d eaten—presumably so one’s body would have some sort of pattern to go by. (He’d tasted most wild game—even sampled falcon when he accidentally shot one and was forced to eat his kill by a grim-faced grandfather.) And—so Dave had said—you had to want to change. Which might be a problem because he was scared to let himself go. Those other times he’d been practically consumed with a desire to escape a situation—and that fear had helped him overcome his apprehension. But here, now, there was only doubt, wonder, frustration. Only one thing else he knew—something Uki had told him quite casually. It was best to transform into something with roughly your own body mass; that help keep the beast-mind at bay. Let’s see, he was about one-sixty, and what kind of critters weighed that much? Not many around here: deer, maybe, or at least big does and mid-sized bucks. Cougar? But he hadn’t eaten cougar and didn’t want to. Besides, if he turned into one of them he might rouse undue interest because there were not—officially—any cougars in Georgia. ’Gators, maybe? He didn’t much like that last notion, either; their thoughts were likely to be too different from his own.