by Tom Deitz
The rest was almost too simple, and the ease with which the transformation was accomplished took Calvin by surprise. Eyes closed, one hand on the scale, and think what it was like to be a deer, then the pain, and the shifting and the pulling, and the distortion of vision, the dulling of some senses, the sharpening of others, and the falling onto all fours.
The pack was too tight, though, and he almost gagged before he managed to shake it into a looser configuration. As prepared as he’d ever be, Calvin trotted away.
And Brock, who had heard him and followed him, and had seen everything, sat alone in the night for a very long time, his mind awash with wonder.
*
Even in deer shape, it took Calvin longer than he’d hoped to make his way back to the clearing, though mostly that was due to problems with the form he had chosen. He’d tried to transform gradually, so as to keep his own thoughts in control. But what he hadn’t counted on was that there would be other whitetails about that this body would scent and want to investigate, which made the animal consciousness want to assert itself even more strongly. There were a lot of deer in Georgia, too: about one for every five people, he thought. But he hadn’t counted on ever inhabiting a body that wanted to get to know them on a one-to-one basis—and certainly not one that could tell a buck from a doe from a fawn by smell alone.
He was having trouble with his antlers, too. Apparently the change more or less translated you into your equivalent age and the appropriate physical aspect for the season which meant that Calvin’s head was crowned with the half-grown rack of a very healthy two-year-old stag—still growing, still in velvet, but already starting to itch.
And another, though very different, concern was that the weird thrumming in the ground kept starting up and then stopping again, and that he did not understand at all. It smacked of magic, but what kind? For that matter, what sort of magic could there be in Willacoochee County? Most places had some kind if you looked deep enough for it, he’d discovered. But how would it manifest around here? He didn’t know squat about Yuchi mythology, except that it was apparently fairly close to Creek, and therefore Cherokee. As for the Spanish, who’d come and gone from the coastal isles before the English arrived and stayed—who knew what kind of weirdness those poor little monks had practiced when the loneliness and the swamp fevers got to them.
Maybe the thrumming was connected to the little girl’s death.
But how?
He was still pondering that question when keen whitetail hearing caught the first distant sound of voices talking excitedly. Almost certainly the sheriff he’d encountered yesterday, he decided as he crept closer. And probably the guy who’d gone off at a run, whom he suspected of being some kind of law-enforcement type as well. There was also the ’coon hunter who’d remained behind, and another man, whose voice was smoother and a little more cultured, along with another whiny-voiced man, and what sounded an awful lot like a woman giving vent to frequent bouts of high-pitched hysterics.
Gotta watch it now, as he crept closer, taking what advantage he could of the frequent shadows and wishing he could get rid of the blasted backpack, since it made movement awkward and noisy. Noise was the key thing, too, because Calvin had hunted enough deer to know that you heard a lot more of them than you saw. Shoot, he’d once watched a whole herd of them wander to within thirty feet of him and spread out across practically his whole field of vision. But so effective was their camouflage that even when he knew they were there he had a hard time distinguishing them from the surrounding forest. It had been sound that had tipped him off to their presence then; he had to be careful that he did not make the same mistake himself.
A few steps closer, and he could finally see somewhat, smell better, and hear well enough to make out even whispers.
What he saw was the rock-girt clearing—only the five people clustered beside the farthest boulder didn’t seem at all impressed by the fact that there shouldn’t be stones like those in south Georgia. Understandable, given the circumstances.
He’d been right about their identities, too: there was Sheriff Lexington, plus Larry the hunter and Rob the policeman, all of whom he had seen before. But there was also an unsavory-looking skinny guy he didn’t recognize, also in Sheriff’s Department togs—and a thin, attractive, thirtyish woman, who seemed to be sticking close to that Rob fellow, even though the sheriff was asking her a lot of questions. They kept calling her Liza-Bet, and from the way she was carrying on, Calvin guessed she was the dead child’s mother.
The sixth person—who was nowhere near a monolith—was a heavyset man of indeterminate age, but old enough to dress with no attention to style and to be bald. He had just set down a video camera with which he had evidently been preserving the whole grisly tableau for posterity, and was now kneeling beside the body and muttering to himself at a furious rate, mostly things like, “Yeah,” and “Okay,” and “Hmmm,” and then quite suddenly and much louder, “Now that’s odd.”
“What is?” the sheriff wondered. “You got somethin’, Bill?”
“Maybe.”
“Well don’t keep us in suspense, boy; spill it.”
The man looked up but did not rise. “You’re sure you found this body just like this?” he was evidently addressing the hunter.
The man nodded vigorously. “Just like that. Just exactly like that.”
“And you didn’t notice anything strange about the body?”
“Nothin’ beyond what you see. Rob’ll vouch for me there.”
The red-haired man escaped Liza-Bet and wandered over to peer over the bald man’s shoulder. “What’cha found?”
“Well,” Bill said slowly. “Now don’t quote me as gospel here, and I won’t know for sure till I can get her back to the morgue, but I’ve been examinin’ this body as best I can and…well, this is gonna sound mighty strange, but…uh, well, the fact is that I…I can’t find no liver.”
“What the hell?”
“No, come here, sheriff, and feel for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“I’ll take your word for it; ’s what we pay you to be coroner for.”
“Okay, then…well, see, it’s like this: your liver sorta sets down below your ribs on the right-hand side. It’s pretty big, and on a moderately skinny person like this poor little child is, anybody that knows what he’s doin’ can feel it.” He paused, as if for effect. “Thing is, when I do that to her, all I can feel is…nothin’, just a hollow place. It’s like something’s removed her liver, sheriff; taken it clean away without makin’ hardly a mark on her body.”
“You’re shittin’ me!”
“Not on your life, sir. There ain’t no liver, and the only sign I can find of how it might have vanished is this little slit of a thing over on her side. Can’t see it too good in this light’s the problem.”
“Oh Lord,” the sheriff moaned. “Not only’ve we got us a goddamned serial killer here, but we’ve got one that mutilates his victims.”
“There was Satanic paraphernalia they found up where that Indian boy’s daddy died, ’member?” the skinny guy whined.
“So I’ve heard,” Robert inserted. “And there may be another victim as well, if what they said about that woman up in Jefferson’s true…”
But Calvin did not pay heed to the rest. Something the coroner had said had set his mind to working feverishly, as if a key piece to a puzzle had just been found, which only required turning the right way in order to fit.
No longer caring if he was seen or not, Calvin turned and bolted, noting with a bit of amusement the shouts and exclamations that followed, the loudest and clearest of which was the sheriff’s: “Aw, shucks, Bill, it wasn’t nothin’ but a goddamned deer.”
Goddamned deer indeed!
That goddamned deer was running lickety-split away from there as fast as it could, with its brain awash with ideas that were right on the verge of coming together but wouldn’t. It was the deer instincts reacting to strong emotions with a desire for flight, Calvin’s hu
man aspect knew. But by doing so, it was also muddling the finer points of his reason.
Which meant he had to change back if he was going to accomplish anything at all. That, in turn, meant he had to get a good ways off.
Before long though, Calvin had found an appropriate place: a dogwood thicket fringed with palmettos.
Except that to return to his own shape he had to prime the scale with blood while thinking about how it felt to be a man. And maneuvering a scale around so that it could poke you enough to draw blood wasn’t easy when you were a quadruped and had hooves. Last time had been an accident: a lucky adjunct of his half-delirious thrashings. This time he had to do it—but how?
Sliding his neck up and down against a tree with the scale between, hoping to impale himself on one of the scale’s three points, didn’t work—mostly because of the pack that was hanging awkwardly around his neck. Attempting the same thing on the ground didn’t succeed either, for the same reason plus the fact that the scale tended to dig into the soft soil. Finally, in desperation, Calvin bit his tongue hard enough for the blood to trickle down his jaw and reach the talisman. Hopefully that would be enough to at least get the transformation started. Truly he hoped that, and was gratified when he felt the beginning of the change.
It hurt like hell, though; far more than it should, and for a long moment Calvin thought he was going to get hung up between forms. Evidently whatever reaction went on between the blood and the scale was dispersed throughout the body by the bloodstream, and if the magic couldn’t get to the bloodstream, well… Blood spat upon the scale was evidently enough to get it going, but not to finish it. Already Calvin could feel the change slowing, and he made one final gamble. Although it had not worked before, he was far more desperate now, so once again he concentrated on altering only one part of himself: his hand. If he could return that to human, he could grab the scale and complete the transformation.
Fighting back the agony that wracked him as his very cells tried to respond to conflicting orders, he wished with all his might for a human right hand. Nothing happened for a moment, but then he felt the hoof shift, draw up, his fingers fly apart, and the instant he could he grabbed for the scale and felt blessed relief as the edges sliced into his flesh.
The pain of transformation was quickly over, and then relief flooded through him as his human shape returned. He crouched beneath the limbs, shivering more from fear than cold, but did not dress lest he’d have to shift again in a hurry. Instead, he kept his hand clamped firmly around the scale and tried to lay out the facts in some kind of logical order. It had been real interesting, he mused. Seemed like everytime he changed, he learned something. Trouble was, it also looked like he had to be in desperate straits for anything much to happen. Maybe that was part of it, though; maybe the process needed adrenaline to trigger it, or at least to speed it along. And what about this wound business? He’d bit his tongue enough to bleed, and though it was still sore, it certainly didn’t hurt as much as it should. As for his other injuries—the bruises, the bullet scrape, and the pounded jaw from that afternoon—not a trace of them remained. He supposed it was possible that when you changed back to your right shape, your cells were simply remembering what you were supposed to be like—and in effect, rebuilt a perfect you.
But that was not dealing with the matter at hand—though he now had a partial answer to that too: one he had known as soon as the transformation was complete; one word from the myths of his people, one name that had haunted his darkest dreams since childhood.
Utlunta!
Literally it meant “she has it sharp,” but to him it conjured a far darker and more specific image: Spearfinger!
It all fit. Calvin thought back over what he knew of the myth, which he’d both heard as a child and encountered again recently in Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee.
As far as he could remember, Spearfinger had no real origin, she simply was. Typically she’d appear as an old squaw wandering alone in the woods. She was usually singing some strange little song which translated as “Liver I eat!”
That was a reference to one of her several bad habits, because if she came up on you alone, she was likely to stab you with a long spearlike finger and then chow down on your liver. Sometimes it didn’t even kill you, sometimes you went home as if nothing had happened, but began to wither and pine, and eventually you died, and sometimes folks found out then that the deceased had no liver, because Spearfinger had taken it.
She was also a shapechanger, and that made her doubly dangerous, because she could kill a person and then take their form and impersonate them when they went home and so be in a prime position to wipe out the rest of the family. Well, she might be a skinchanger, but so, by God, was he.
There was another peculiarity about Spearfinger too, though most folks forgot about it on account of her evocative name and bad eating habits. And that was that she was sometimes called Nunyunuwi, which more or less meant “dressed in stone.” Actually, though, it was a reference to the fact that Spearfinger supposedly had skin like stone and had mastery over it—which would neatly explain how there happened to be sandstone boulders on the edge of a south Georgia swamp, not to mention how articulated dolls could be made out of pebbles.
“That’s a pretty wild conclusion to jump to, though,” Calvin confided aloud to the half-grown raccoon that had wandered into his sanctum and was now eyeing him with beady little eyes.
The most perplexing question was what such a being was doing in this World at all when by rights she should have been terrorizing Galunlati. She’d even followed Dave for a while, the first time they’d gone there. Dave had told Calvin all about it—how Yanu, the bear who was his guide at the time, had casually mentioned that Spearfinger had come close the previous night.
Dave!
Another part of the puzzle clicked into place.
Spearfinger had pursued Dave at least once, and Dave had obviously eluded her. That meant that there was a reasonable possibility that she might have become angry—or maybe curious to match wits with a different kind of quarry than she was used to. And then that prey had slipped through her fingers and returned to another World…
But if this whole shaky theory was correct, how in hell had she got into this World—and conveniently found her way to the exact spot where one of Dave’s friends was camping?
And then Calvin knew.
He could see it all so clearly: a scrap of dirt road in a private woods in Jackson County, a towering oak tree, the moonlight shining down on a certain red Mustang parked nearby, Dave and Alec and Liz laid out in sleeping bags…
It was the night before the ritual they had used to open the gate to the Otherworld that held Fionchadd captive. But in order to facilitate that ritual, they needed the blood of a large animal.
Calvin, rather too eager to try his hand at some of the charms Uki had been teaching him, had decided to circumvent the numerous POSTED signs that dotted the wood by summoning Awi-Usdi, the Little Deer, to aid him. And in order to facilitate Awi-Usdi’s passage from Galunlati, Calvin had raised his first-ever fog, for it blurred the distinctions between the Worlds, and Awi-Usdi had obligingly come.
And apparently the premier evil of Galunlati as well.
Calvin could have kicked himself. How could he have been so stupid? No reason at all that Awi-Usdi had to be the only thing to answer the call; probably anything with Power in Galunlati would have heard him if the Little Deer had; and certainly a being as powerful as Spearfinger, who had doubtlessly seen—and heard—him already. Given that, there was no reason why, having heard him, she couldn’t have decided to investigate—especially when she had a score to settle with upstart prey that had escaped her before. And if Spearfinger had entered the human World when Calvin had raised that fog, she would certainly have sensed Dave nearby.
But why hadn’t she attacked him then? For that matter, why not attack them all and leave no witnesses?
All the pieces were laid out now, but a few still hadn’t found t
heir proper places.
Like his dad’s death.
Except… If Spearfinger was after Dave, she obviously hadn’t got hold of him as of Tuesday noon, because Calvin had been with him almost constantly until then. In fact, she would probably have had a hard time keeping track of him at all during the past few days, what with him zipping out of the World at least twice, with only about fifteen minutes between, and that at the coast, hundreds of miles from where she’d first entered the World—assuming she’d come through in Jackson County. That could have caused her real trouble, especially if she was trying to follow Dave’s actual route, since his trail would have led her first to Stone Mountain—where she’d then have lost him completely, because Dave hadn’t been in this World for nearly a day after that. Maybe she’d hung around there for a while, though, trying to locate him, during which interval she’d found occasion to snack on Calvin’s unfortunate old man. Yeah, that made sense, ’cause when Dave returned from Galunlati at the coast Monday night Calvin doubted he’d have been there long enough for Spearfinger to sense him—especially if she didn’t know where she should be looking. And after that Dave had been moving so quickly (usually in a car, which could have confused her as well, if it didn’t mask his trail entirely) there was no way anyone not used to dealing with technology could have kept up with him by conventional tracking methods. The longest time Dave had been in one place was at the seafood restaurant, so if Spearfinger had finally sensed him, there was a good possibility it would have been then, and she’d have headed that way next.
But if Dave had returned Tuesday morning and Calvin’s dad had died Tuesday evening, why had Spearfinger waited so long to leave Stone Mountain?
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Spearfinger couldn’t detect Dave this far away—until the magic Calvin had fooled with Tuesday night in his vain attempt at contacting Uki had given her a lead.
Yet if that was true, how had she got here so fast?
“Too many questions,” Calvin told the ’coon, shaking his head. “But,” he added with a grin, “if it really is Spearfinger committing these murders while she’s goin’ after my friend, I know how to defeat her!”