“Who is it?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
He’d heard Carl tumble down the steps. He’d heard him squeal. And he was looking right at him. So why did he ask, in a tone of bleak surrender, “It’s you, isn’t it, Merle?” Was he blind? Carl’s eyesight as a pig was not what it had been, and he had to come quite close before he saw the gauze mat of spiderwebs that covered the boy’s face. Not just his eyes, though they were thickest there, but in his nostrils and all about his ears and through the stubble of his hair and beard. Carl was not squeamish by nature, and his life as a pig had rid him of any qualms he may have had as a human. Even so, he was dismayed. He couldn’t think what Merle had been up to, but his first unconsidered impulse was to clean away the gruesome mummy wrappings that Reverend Johnson had so patiently been weaving across Alan’s face.
Alan quailed at the first swipe of the pig’s rough, wet tongue, and then he had the good sense to close his eyes tight as Carl continued his crude cleansing. With each lick he would wipe off as much of each clotted mass of cobwebs as he could, using the boy’s shirt or his own hoof, afterwards, as a napkin. Really, it was no worse than chewing tobacco, though as with tobacco you had to be careful not to swallow. But pigs don’t have a human facility for spitting, and once or twice he did swallow, and the last such swallow, after he’d licked away the tangle over Alan’s ear, represented the final extinction of Reverend Martin Johnson, who entered Carl’s stomach to mingle his own meager juices with the blood of Merle Two Moons and the various enzymes of Carl’s digestive tract. The spider knew a brief flash of terror as it died—such as the reverend had often described to his parishioners in depicting the fate of sinners who fall into the hands of a vengeful God—and then, as its tissues dissolved, it entered its own spidery eternity, where its first terror blossomed endlessly into larger and brighter terrors, beyond the imagining of any spider, or any Lutheran minister, for that matter.
At the moment Reverend Johnson entered his own private Hades, Alan opened his eyes and saw what his situation was at that moment. He felt no terror, only a profound astonishment.
“Hamlet,” he marveled feebly.
Carl tried to smile, but he lacked the muscles that would have made such reassurance possible. He did manage to nod his head up and down, as though to say, “Yes, it’s me, and I’m here to set you free.”
“Hamlet,” Alan said again. “God damn. This is so… Merle said you were… That Diana had…”
Carl lowered his head, admitting what Merle had said and Diana had done.
“But I thought he was crazy. And he is. Crazy… and dangerous. And he’s going to be back here any moment.”
Carl shook his head, slowly and decisively: No, Merle would not be back.
“He won’t?” Alan asked, believing and not believing. “You can understand what I’m saying?”
Carl nodded, and Alan, with a little more thought, began to laugh. Very weakly, and for only a short while.
He accepted the situation. His life had been an education in doing just that, and being chained down and starved had been the finishing school.
“I’m hungry,” he told the pig. “That Merle wanted to kill me.”
Carl nodded. He understood that very well.
He mounted the stairs slowly, trying to place his weight away from the center of each step. The step he’d broken on the way down presented a challenge, but he was careful. Up in the cabin he took a survey of the scattered contents of the freezer, and item by item, by nudges and kicks, he got it all across the room to the edge of the steps. The ice cream, as being the likeliest first course, he carried down with his teeth clamped about the cardboard box.
He’d always loved maple walnut.
Feeding the boy was not that easy. Carl had no hands, and the boy’s arms were chained to the wooden platform. Carl managed to spread open the ice cream carton by tooth and hoof, and he positioned it so that Alan could lick up the softening ice cream as though it were a big cone. But pressure had to be exerted so it stayed in place where Alan could get at it. Alan was ravenous, and Carl feared he would strangle from the sheer joy of feeding. But though he did, once or twice, start to choke, ice cream, in its nature, is easy to get down. The carton was emptied in a few minutes, and Carl allowed himself the luxury of licking up the residues left on the carton.
“Thank you,” said Alan afterward. “That was wonderful.”
Carl acknowledged this with a curt nod. He was already thinking ahead to the next course. The sunfish? That would have been his own choice, after they’d thawed a bit. The mystery leftovers? No, probably a pizza. It would thaw the quickest and be easiest to chew.
But before he could devise a pizza-delivery system, the phone rang. Carl had become so human in his thinking that his first impulse was relief. The burden of care would be off his shoulders: help was on the way. Then he realized that he couldn’t answer a telephone, and even if he could, he wasn’t sure it would be a wise thing to do. Anyone calling Merle Two Moons might be a similar demented scumbag. In fact, it might be Diana.
He looked to Alan for advice. Alan was also paralyzed, but his eyes were fixed on the phone, which was in what must be Merle’s corner of the basement, beside the one comfy chair, the VCR, and an old Magnavox TV.
Carl was an inveterate believer in his own good luck. He went to the phone and nudged the receiver from its cradle.
“Hello?” said the one voice he had longed most to hear again. Carl stared in mute reverence at the receiver where it lay on the dirt floor.
“Hello? Is somebody there?”
Carl remained silent. Any sound he might have made would only have frightened Kelly, who sounded frightened enough already. He looked up, promptingly, at Alan.
“Hello,” Alan said as loudly as he could.
“Hello! Alan, is that you? I almost can’t hear you.”
Carl pulled the receiver by its spiraling cord closer to where Alan lay chained.
“Who is it?” Alan asked. “I can’t hear. It’s not Diana, is it? She calls here all the time. She knows what Merle is doing.”
“Hello? Please, Alan, Mommy’s in trouble. There’s something wrong with her. She never comes out of her room. It’s locked. Alan? You got to help us. Please.”
“Help!” Alan called out, as loudly as he could.
There was a scream at the other end of the line, and then a banging sound, and then it was Diana on the line: “Merle, is that you? I’ve been trying to get in touch for days. Get up to your room, young lady! Merle, I know you’re there. Don’t start playing games with me. We’ve got trouble. Merle?”
“Help!” Alan called out again before Carl could pull the phone cord from the wall socket.
Alan, his face still smeared with the ice cream, began to cry—and Carl would have too, if pigs could cry. They were fucked now. Diana was probably already on her way here. And what could he do? As much as he hated her, Carl wasn’t sure she didn’t still have her weird power over him. He remembered how docilely he’d entered the sty when she’d told him to.
He gave a few well-meaning tugs at the chain securing Alan’s ankles, but he knew from prior experience in the sty that his teeth would give before the chain did. It was bolted in solid.
He wished there was more he could do for Alan, but he was more concerned now for his daughter. And for Janet. Alan would have to look out for himself.
Before he headed back up the stairs, Carl managed to position one of the thawing pizzas where Alan could get his teeth into it. Even while he went on crying, Alan started to chew. Carl wished he could say good-bye. He wanted to be able to explain his betrayal—that he had no choice, that he was no match for Diana.
52
Insofar as he had had a plan, his plan had worked. He was out of New Ravensburg. The human body of Jim Cottonwood was lying comatose in the back of an ambulance, heading for the hospital in which it would await his spirit’s return, a puzzle for the doctors. His crow body was winging its way above the reedy southern sh
ore of Leech Lake, well beyond the perimeter that had limited his earlier flights above the prison to the aerial equivalent of the rooftop jogging track. Below him was the real world in all its lovely grunginess: Ki-Wa-Wa-Yun-Wa Christian Youth Camp, Don’s Bait Shop and Gaseteria, Bailey’s Tourist Cabins (with color TV in every room), Lakeshore Canoe Rentals, and a huge billboard pointing to the turnoff for the Wabasha Wonderland Casino—every bit of it brand-new to Jim and a source of wonder. It was as though all Leech Lake had been transformed into Florida during the time he’d been locked away, every ditch and bog offering its own little enticement for the tourists driving by.
How he would have liked to be a citizen of that country, where all human pleasures seemed so possible. But equally he enjoyed flying over that country as a crow, unenticed, inhuman, free.
He could be a crow forever if he chose. Or for whatever part of forever a crow could look to. It was a temptation, but the human part of him knew that even a life locked up in the joint was a better deal than being any kind of animal. If you weren’t bred to be slaughtered, then you were going to be hunted by something larger and faster. And the drum that beat out the rhythm of the whole endless dance marathon was hunger. He could feel it now at the core of this crow, like the purr of a car’s engine, the sustaining hum of its hunger. Oh, it was great to be able to fly, but did crows know that? Jim could feel no elation like his own resonating from the crow’s meager mind, nothing but the dumb one-two, one-two drumming of its heartbeat as it set the pace for its wings’ unceasing effort.
He reached the point where the main road diverged from the lakeshore, and there, standing propped against the tailgate of his pickup and sending up smoke signals from his Swisher Sweet stogie, was Gordon Pillager. Jim banked and rode the air in a slow downward spiral until he landed atop a burlap feedbag in the bed of the pickup.
Gordon saluted him with a tight little smile that didn’t disguise the fact that he was missing most of his teeth. “Yo, crow,” said Gordon. “Like the man says on TV, I got good news and bad news.” He paused for effect, and Jim tilted his head sideways to signal that he was listening.
“Good news is, you’re a free man. That’s why there was the long delay after they got the body in the ambulance. You are no longer a ward of the state, or whatever the fuck they call it. You been released. I got the feeling the paperwork was all done a while ago, maybe a couple weeks, but they just hadn’t got round to telling you yet. No surprise there.
“Bad news is, the ambulance ain’t heading for St. Cloud like we figured it would. You’re not a prisoner now, so they can’t send you to the locked ward there. So you’re headed for somewhere in Duluth or close by, but even the ambulance driver didn’t know where. First, a doc has got to figure out what’s wrong, then they decide where you go. So, like you, it’s all up in the air.
“I don’t see you got any reason to panic. You can hop a ride with me inside the pickup and we could head to Duluth now. Or we can wait till we know where in Duluth to head to. They got to tell Louise soon as they know. She’s going to have go along with the two of us anyhow, ‘cause she’s the one got visitation rights.
“So that’s the situation. What I suggest, my friend, is just enjoy yourself. Ride the wind. But remember who you are. Don’t get too caught up in being a crow. Each time you go to sleep inside that new skin it’s a little harder the next day to remember you got another body to go back to. And don’t mess with other crows. I mean, sex. I did that once. In my wolf years. Oh, that was fun, but I stayed too long at the party. And I almost didn’t get home. Hang round outside Louise’s place. I’ll keep in touch with her. You do the same. Okay?”
Unthinkingly Jim responded with what he meant to be “Okay.” A caw was as close as he got.
Jim took the news, both good and bad, calmly. It didn’t really change anything, but it was good to touch base with Gordon. He’d been Jim’s first guide in the Other World, as he called it, and the only genuine shaman Jim had ever known besides himself. Shamanism wasn’t something you could sit down and learn. It was like music: you were born with it or you weren’t, though if you were, there was a good chance that sooner or later you’d be spotted by someone else with the same gift, as Gordon had spotted Jim when he was sixteen and Gordon was already missing most of his teeth and a lot of his hair. All through the time Jim was in the lockup, Gordon had stayed in touch, and they’d worked out the escape plan years back, when Jim had begun to think New Ravensburg was going to be a lifetime residence. So this had been intended as his own private loophole, an exit visa to be used only in case of an emergency. A way to avoid the one thing Jim dreaded more than anything else, which was dying inside.
Better to leave the prison as a crow, and live a crow life as long as he could, than to die a prisoner. Gordon sympathized, and had agreed to do what he could in such a contingency. He had come to the prison parking lot on the day appointed for the sweat lodge, bringing his own convocation of five crows. The crows had circled the smoke that issued from the vent of the sweat lodge, and Jim, inside, had heard their calls. He went outside, signaling to the guards not to approach. Often those in the lodge had to take a breather. The guards stayed back, but one crow alit on the lintel of the lodge.
Jim had entered the crow, but even then he remained on the lintel, like Poe’s raven on the pallid bust of Pallas (it was his favorite poem, he knew it by heart), for the whole time it took for the medics to be summoned and Jim’s human body to be loaded into the ambulance and driven away. Even then he had not been sure that the old strictures that had limited his range of flight to the prison’s own airspace would not still be in force.
But they were not. His human body was out of New Ravensburg, and his crow body enjoyed the same freedom.
He found the turnoff onto County Road B, not far from where Gordon had parked, and followed it, but at an altitude that let him whittle away some of the extra mileage between the prison and the Kellog farm, where he was headed. His mother had given him directions, but they were based on the signposts she used herself when she drove to visit him: an old barn with a sagging roof, a big fenced-off acreage destined to be landfill, a stretch of Highway Department spruces as regular as wallpaper, and then, at last, the turn left onto a gravel road. According to his mother’s directions he was just about there.
The sky, though cloudless, seemed to grow darker. Without meaning to, he lost altitude and felt his wings wearying. He’d never flown this far, for such a length of time, and so the fatigue might have been just a fact of crow physiology.
But then the farm itself came into view, just the shingles of the roof, and he knew that the darkness, which was thicker now, had its source not in some trick of the atmosphere but in the presence, ahead of him, of some firmly rooted evil. It was as clear and unmistakable as a bad fart.
The smell of his enemy.
53
Diana had never been good at fixing things when they broke. Replace the little black rubber thingy inside a leaky faucet? As well ask her to install an automobile transmission.
Now it was the same with her magic, only there are no repairmen to call when magic goes awry. She’d talked about the matter some with Merle, but he had no inside information, no grimoire or secret formulas. His magic was all impulse and intuition. Like a laboratory rat who’d learned to run a maze, he did what had worked for him before. Put him in another maze, and he was lost. In any case, Merle wasn’t picking up his phone. Diana was on her own.
The problem was Janet.
Even before Janet’s parole, Diana had intended to do for her sister what she’d already done for Carl. There was no way the two of them could have lived together. Janet was a control freak. She wanted everything done her way. It had become impossible to discipline Kelly. Janet wanted the keys to Carl’s Chevy, even though, while she was on parole, her license was invalid. She complained about Diana’s cooking. She’d told Diana to stop using the smokehouse, though Diana had held her ground on that, insisting that all the meat
was not yet properly cured and would spoil if she let the fire go out. Basically, Janet wanted her sister off the premises, and if she hadn’t been on parole, she would probably just have pulled rank and told Diana to pack her bags.
So there had not been much choice. Diana had acted in the manner already proven effective. She had doctored Janet’s liquor supply with her own essence of mandragora, and on an opportune occasion, when Janet was soused and in a foul temper, she had let rip. “You’re a pig, Janet, do you know that?”
She’d seen Janet wince, and go red in the face, and swell within her dowdy housedress.
“Fuck you!” Janet responded.
Diana just ignored her. “A pig!” she repeated emphatically, “A sow!”
There were hooves now in Janet’s slippers, but her face remained Janet’s—familiar, hateful, jowly, dense.
“You’re the pig,” Janet had said in a level voice, even as she tottered forward, still unaware of her transformation, still with her human head planted ridiculously on her pig body. “Worse than a pig. A snake in the grass. I’ve always known it. I should never have agreed to let you come here. Get out now! Do you hear that?”
Diana had known then a moment of fear, or trepidation, or indecision, for she had bolted from the room, slamming the door behind her. Only then had she thought to secure her curse by a third, conclusive repetition: “A pig!”
The words had been followed by a howl from the other side of the door. Janet must have finally realized, then, the change that had come over her, for there were sobs and a single wordless squeal of rage and other noises. But among those noises, there were noises no pig could have made, and Diana knew, even before she opened the door again, that the magic had not taken. Not quite.
Janet had been chastened. She had wedged her thick body between the window and the bed, hiding her still human head, from shame, beneath the bedframe, like a guilty child. Diana could not see her face, but she had heard her say, “Go away.” From that she assumed that the magic had not had its full effect. She’d turned her sister into one of those impossible monstrosities you read about in Greek myths or see in the freak show at a county fair. Janet, the Pig Woman.
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 28