by David Boop
Dawson could hear Tate calling his name from somewhere above. “Outta there!” the old man screamed. But Dawson felt staked to the ground. Some things were too big for a man to reckon with. The war taught him that, if anything. He hugged himself tight and made himself stare directly into the massive face of the oblivion coming to take him out of this world.
But then that damned bolter finally stopped. Dawson figured it just let gravity take its course—that’s how the big old thing got down the mountain. Something like that plows up a lot of ground, and eventually that’s going to stop even something big as a whale. And like any whale, this thing was a big bag of blubber, with no arms or legs, so not much it could do once it stopped.
Relieved, Dawson got out of its path and scrambled up on a big mound of rock and dirt at least ten yards away. He dusted himself off, giddy over his last-second reprieve, and tickled at the prospect of now watching the second part of Tate’s tale unfold, the part where the bolter uses those hooks on its tail to drag itself back up the mountain. Now that was going to be a sight to see and quite a tale to tell his grandchildren! And didn’t he have just the perfect perch for witnessing it all? He just hoped it wasn’t too dark to make out the details.
But then he felt that rumbling under his feet. He thought at first it was just the ground shaking from the bolter’s laborious ascent, but it hadn’t started back up yet. In fact it appeared to just be staring at him with them huge, lovestruck eyes! And Dawson of course would understand that look more than most.
The ground rumbled again, and Dawson looked down just as a massive eye opened up beside one of his boots. He stared back at the bolter and not only understood, but sympathized. If you’ve been calling out for your mate for years, it was only natural justice that some night she would answer.
It almost lessened his terror as the bolter’s mate shook off more of the dirt covering her face, dropped open her jaw, and swallowed him whole. Almost. And as Dawson felt himself sucked down into his digestive demise, he couldn’t help thinking he wouldn’t be in this fix if just one of them gals just said yes.
DREAMCATCHER
Marsheila Rockwell
She was at it again.
Father Grady had just left the Petersen homestead, making his rounds bringing Holy Communion to parishioners who lived too far out from Salina, Kansas, to come to Mass on Sunday, and he carried in his hand another one of Morning Star Woman’s sacred hoops.
Dreamcatchers, some whites called them. When he’d worked in the newly formed Diocese of Duluth back in Minnesota, the Ojibwe there had called them asabikeshiinh, which he believed meant spider. It made sense—they looked like webs, and he understood they were meant to “catch” the bad dreams of infants and children and allow only the good ones through the hole in the center, guided down to the child by the hoop’s single feather.
Superstitious nonsense, of course. Blasphemous, even.
Which was why he’d confiscated the sinew-and-willow circles at every home he’d found them in and thrown them out with the trash. But somehow, they kept reappearing, despite his lectures to the good people of the Diocese of Concordia that the best way to keep their nights trouble-free was to recite the Prayer to St. Michael, which Pope Leo XIII had added to the Low Mass just a few years earlier, in 1886. Of course, it took time for changes in Rome to make it across the ocean, let alone out onto the Great Plains, and he was one of only a few priests serving this area—more now that Bishop Scannel was actively recruiting from other dioceses—but still woefully insufficient for the sheer number of miles that needed to be covered. There were parishioners, like the Petersens, that he only saw once every other month because it took him that long to make his rounds in between his regular duties at the church.
Plenty of time for the displaced Ojibwe woman to get up to mischief.
He’d heard her story from several of the homesteaders out here—she was the wife of a Duluth railroad worker who’d taken ill in the cold and moved south for his health. Unfortunately, the marginally warmer winters here had not been enough to counteract whatever ailed the man, and he had died soon after, leaving his Indian wife with a house in the middle of the Smoky Hills, a horse, a rifle, and little else. She hunted her own game and grew her own produce, trading for dry goods and other things she needed by providing herbal remedies to the community.
In other words, potions and talismans, like any good witch.
Father Grady could almost forgive the Petersens for accepting another dreamcatcher from the Indian woman—Sarah Petersen was a young mother with a colicky baby and no other women nearby to help her with the tasks of raising a newborn. Anything that might alleviate the child’s squalling and allow for even a modicum of sleep would no doubt be welcome in their household.
But at what cost? Relying on Morning Star Woman’s charms instead of the Lord’s mercy was one step down a slippery slope that led right to the gates of Hell, and it was his responsibility to keep the Petersens—and all of Salina’s faithful Catholics—firmly on the straight and narrow.
What had started as merely an annoyance could quickly become a battle for the souls of Salina. He needed to face his adversary head-on and confront her before it got to that point.
After all, she’d been the wife of a white man in a prosperous northern city. She must have more than just the veneer of civilization; something of the white man’s ways must have stuck with her. Surely she could be reasoned with.
Father Grady looked at the dreamcatcher in his hands. He’d taken this newest one from Sarah Petersen and told her not to accept another, on pain of mortal sin. She’d tearfully acceded.
Now he crushed it between his palms until the leather-wrapped willow snapped. Then he tore it in two, ripping the sinew webbing apart and tossing it to the ground beneath his horse’s hooves. Satisfied that there was one less of the Indian woman’s fetishes in the world to tempt his parishioners, he turned his horse’s head and made for the western hills where he knew she lived.
Behind him, the hoop’s feather floated to the earth, landing atop the ruins of the dreamcatcher before a gust of prairie wind caught it and blew it far away.
* * *
Morning Star Woman sat on her porch waiting for him when he arrived, though it was twilight and she couldn’t have seen him approaching. Her dark silhouette on the front stairs gave him a momentary chill.
“Good evening, Father,” she said in near-perfect English as he brought his horse to a halt and dismounted.
“Good evening, ma’am,” he replied politely, walking toward her. Lamp light shone from inside the open front door, illuminating something in her hands. As he neared, he was nonplussed to see it was another dreamcatcher.
“Waaban-anangokwe,” she corrected. “You are from Onigamiising, like me. Surely you can use my name?”
Onigamiising was the Ojibwe word for Duluth; it meant “place of the small portage.” In point of fact, he was only from the Diocese of Duluth, which encompassed ten counties in northern Minnesota, and not from the city itself, but he didn’t think the distinction was worth making.
“My apologies. I never properly learned your language; I’m afraid any attempt I made to pronounce your name would mangle it beyond recognition.”
She caught him looking at the dreamcatcher.
“You like it? Onizhishin.”
“Yes, it is pretty,” he replied, recognizing the phrase.
Morning Star Woman laughed, a surprisingly pleasant sound.
“That’s not all onizhishin means, Father. It means something is good. That it’s right. It’s as it should be.”
“Well, I’m afraid I have to disagree with you about that, ma’am,” he said.
Morning Star Woman’s head turned so that her face caught the light, and Father Grady saw that she was far younger than he had expected. Probably only in her late twenties, and dressed in buckskin rather than black robes. Certainly not the crone he’d been envisioning, though he supposed that biblical witches were never actually des
cribed thusly—that depiction came from fairy tales. In reality, witches were far harder to identify and far more dangerous.
“Oh?”
“Your charms to chase away bad dreams are against church teachings, ma’am, as I suspect you may already know. I can’t allow you to continue giving them to my parishioners. You’re endangering their souls, whether you intend to or not.”
“On the contrary, Father. I’m trying to keep them out of danger.”
“I’m glad to hear that. It means we have the same goal.”
The Indian woman inclined her head, but said nothing.
“I need you to give me your word that you’ll stop making them.”
“No.”
Father Grady was taken aback. He hadn’t expected her to refuse. He tried again.
“Then I need you to stop giving them to my parishioners.”
“Parishioners?”
“The Catholics. The ones with the crucifixes and the rosaries. If you want to keep giving them to the Protestants out here, or the heathens, well, they’re not part of my flock and there’s nothing much I can do about that. But I have to insist you leave the Catholics out of it.”
“You want them to have no defense against their nightmares?”
“I want them to rely on the Lord Jesus Christ, His Blessed Mother Mary, and Saint Michael the Archangel for their defense. Not some Indian superstition. I want them to rely on their faith.”
“Have you considered that if their faith were enough, they wouldn’t have turned to me in the first place?”
“They need to strengthen their faith, not abandon it in favor of trinkets.”
“And what are your crucifixes and rosaries, if not trinkets?”
Father Grady pursed his lips.
“I’m not here to debate theology with you. I’m here to secure your promise that you will leave my parishioners alone. If you truly care about protecting them, you’ll do as I ask.”
Morning Star Woman smiled, and the expression was somehow less pleasant than her laugh had been.
“Of course, Father. We will see if your Saint Michael is as effective as Spider Woman at keeping the night terrors at bay. And if he is not? You know where to find me.”
* * *
It was another month and a half before Father Grady made it back to the Petersen homestead, and by the time he got there, he was dreading what he would find. A mysterious hemorrhagic fever had run through the community, taking the lives of several children and elderly residents, but not before causing them to hallucinate horrible creatures attacking them. Father Grady had sat with one young boy as he was in the throes of such a vision—the priest had never been to an exorcism, but he’d heard them described, and felt like he was in the middle of one as he prayed the Prayer to Saint Michael over the boy and tried to calm him, right up until the moment the child opened his mouth and vomited blood all over the both of them before collapsing back on the bed, dead and staring, his face contorted in terror.
The Halperns had had half their cattle slaughtered by what the law was calling a wolf pack, though no one had seen wolves do this kind of damage to steers before—literally tearing the carcasses to shreds and leaving the meat behind, uneaten.
Butch McCafferty had taken his shotgun and shot his entire family before putting the barrel in his own mouth and blowing off his head.
It didn’t escape Father Grady’s notice that each household was Catholic. They had one other thing in common, too.
They were all homes he’d confiscated dreamcatchers from.
So it was with some trepidation that he approached the Petersen house, not knowing what horrors awaited him.
Sarah Petersen greeted him at the door, all smiles.
“Hello, Father! How are you?”
Father Grady blinked in surprise. This, he had not been expecting.
“Tired,” he said honestly. “How are you and Ted? And the little one, Mary Rose?”
“We’re well, Father,” Sarah replied, ushering him into the small kitchen and gesturing for him to sit while she poured him some coffee from a tin pot on the cast iron stove. Mary Rose’s cradle was near the stove, no doubt for warmth as the evenings were beginning to turn crisp. The baby was lying in it, sleeping peacefully. “I’ll fetch Ted. He’s out back.”
When she was out of the kitchen, on a hunch, Father Grady got up from his chair and crossed over to the cradle. For a moment, he was afraid he might find the child dead, her seemingly sane mother actually out of her mind with grief tending to a corpse as though it were still alive and nothing in the world was wrong. It would fit with everything else that had been going on in Salina this month.
But, no, little Mary Rose was in fact sleeping like a proverbial angel, her cheeks as pink as her namesake flowers. Father Grady was about to turn away when a flash of color caught his eye. He reached down and pulled the woolen blanket back to reveal one of Morning Star Woman’s dreamcatchers clutched in Mary Rose’s chubby fist.
“I’m sorry, Father,” Sarah’s voice sounded from behind him. “I know you said it was a sin. But I just couldn’t risk it. Not with everything that’s been happening.”
Father Grady covered the baby back up before straightening and turning back to the young couple.
“It’s all right. I think God understands,” he said.
He thought he did now, too.
“Do you mind if I stay here for the night? It’s too late to travel any more this evening, and I need to head farther west in the morning.”
“Of course, Father. You’re always welcome.”
Father Grady smiled and thanked them. After a simple dinner of soup and bread, he lay down in their extra bedroom—the one that Mary Rose would share with any siblings she might someday have—exhausted and sore. He was asleep in moments.
* * *
At first, his slumber was dreamless, a welcome respite from the nightmares of the past month. But then figures began to slowly coalesce out of the darkness, countless slavering demons with claws like razors and red, glowing eyes. They advanced on him hungrily, and he realized that he stood in front of Mary Rose’s cradle, the only buffer between her and the demonic horde. He held up a crucifix, its crucified Christ weeping blood. He began to recite the Prayer to St. Michael in a trembling voice, all the while wondering if he should instead be chanting the Commendation of the Dying.
The monsters did not even pause.
The first one had nearly reached him, was pulling its arm back to swipe at him with its razor claws, when suddenly Morning Star Woman appeared before him, holding up a staff to block the demon’s blow.
Its claws bounced off the slim wooden pole as if the weapon were made of iron. Then there was a flurry of motion as the demon attacked the Indian woman in earnest, but she fought it off, her staff moving faster than Father Grady’s eyes could follow. Behind him, Mary Rose began to cry.
He turned and quickly gathered the child from the cradle, glancing over his shoulder as he did so. He saw another of the demons rake its claws across Morning Star Woman’s thigh. She went down to one knee, still fighting valiantly, moments away from being overwhelmed.
Father Grady would not waste his chance. He took the baby and ran.
And woke with a start, sweating, to see the sun creeping through a crack in the gingham curtains that covered the room’s small window.
Time to go.
* * *
Morning Star Woman was waiting for him on the porch again when he arrived.
“Father,” she said. “I thought I’d be seeing you soon.”
“What have you done to my people?” he demanded, eschewing niceties. His parishioners had not been terrorized until he’d demanded she stop handing out her charms to them. Ergo, she must have cursed them in retaliation, perhaps hoping they’d do as the Petersens had done, ignore his edicts and come running back to her, regardless.
“What have I done? You are the one who removed them from my protection.”
That brought Father Grady u
p short.
“Wait. You’re claiming you’re not the cause of these atrocities being committed against my parishioners?”
“I was the only thing standing in the way of those atrocities. Do you not know what haunts this land?”
Father Grady frowned.
“What are you talking about?”
“The blood of many who have died by violence stains these hills. Their spirits do not rest. They seek out the living to share their torment. The asabikeshiinh kept them at bay, away from the families—the children—who had no part in the taking of innocent lives. But you removed them, and let the maji-manidoog have their way. Now they stalk the land freely, sowing destruction wherever they may.”
Father Grady had seen that destruction with his own eyes, and seen it bypass the Petersen’s homestead as if their lintel had been painted with the blood of the Passover lamb. He could not doubt her words, as contrary to his faith as they were.
“Then return their dreamcatchers, so the spirits will let them be.”
“It is too late for that. The evil has grown too strong for the asabikeshiinh to hold it back—even those who are now covered by their protection will not remain safe for much longer. You saw that for yourself last night.”
Father Grady’s eyes narrowed.
“How could you know about that, unless you were behind the attack?”
“Not behind it. Trying to stop it.” And she lifted the hem of her buckskin dress to reveal four long gashes along her thigh.
Father Grady felt a chill wash over him as he realized the woman was telling the truth. Then he thought of little Mary Rose. The idea of that sweet baby succumbing to the evils he had seen sickened him. He could not let that happen.
Would not.
“Then what are we to do? If neither my faith nor your beliefs can stop this scourge, how can we protect these people?”
“We must go to where the evil is strongest. Only there can we fight it.”