Authors: Anne C. Petty
Not far beyond the pine, Ned spotted the overgrown meander of a trail, and farther down it, a stand of old-growth oaks. Heart beating, he stepped into the tangle of ilex, a native holly that could rake your skin raw if you weren’t careful. Ned pushed through dense clumps of sparkleberry bushes with tiny white flowers bright against glossy green leaves, trying to keep the faint trail in sight. It looked vaguely familiar, but he spent the next half-hour unsure if it was the route to the house he’d been born in. The sun was starting to cast lengthening westerly shadows when at last it began to feel right in a way that only memory could produce. He quickened his pace, pushing through the underbrush, reliving in his mind that panicked, mad dash that had sent him running down this same trail years ago with snake venom pumping through his veins.
Slowing to a walk, Ned began to look for the oak grove off to his right, and shortly, he found it. There was no mistaking the site because there were his initials, N.W., carved into the skin of a sentinel oak whose massive branches now nearly touched the ground. Heart pounding, he stepped around it into the cool woodland shade.
Stumbling forward through catbrier thickets, Ned searched for signs of the house foundation, but all was overgrown with trees that had been knee-high in his childhood and were now taller than his head. Ned was hot and insect-bitten, but not about to rest when he was this close.
He’d hoped to find some remains of the house, but with every stubbed toe and scratched ankle it seemed less likely. Tripped by a vine, he fell forward, hands splayed out in front of his face. They touched something jagged and hard. Scrambling to his knees, Ned saw a pile of limestone rocks, one as large as a car tire, covered by creepers and ferns. He pulled the vines away, revealing a familiar display that brought years of terror and pain and heartsick yearning back in a flash. He’d piled those stones in place himself, with his mother’s help. They covered his father’s grave.
Ned took a deep breath and sat dry-eyed, just listening to the deep quiet that descended. In early afternoon sunlight, the grove of ancient oaks drowsed in silence except for an occasional whisper of breeze over the glade.
Finally, Ned stood and faced southwestward away from the gravesite. He now knew exactly where the remains of house ought to be, and within minutes he found the charred timbers hiding under sprays of wild lobelia and daisy fleabane, the blackened rippled wood a sharp contrast to the whites and pale lavenders of the tiny flowers. He walked the perimeter of the foundation with care, looking but not touching. It was easy to see where the main walls had been; they’d fallen inward, forming a large blackened rectangle several layers deep. He found no sign of furniture or other household objects in the debris. Had the fire been hot enough to reduce everything inside to drifts of ash and melted glass? He assumed that any human remains had long since been disposed of by woodland scavengers. A shiver passed over him at the thought, and he stepped away from the house.
Pushing through a waist-high stand of wild grapes toward what had once been the front yard, Ned was heartened to find the area still canopied by three massive live oaks so old their long weathered limbs sprawled away from their gnarled trunks in impossible twists and spirals of living driftwood. The limbs of the three patriarchs were so thoroughly interlaced that in summer, when they were in full foliage, a boy could stand underneath them in a light rain and not get wet.
He chose one whose massive roots formed a kind of bench and settled himself against its aged trunk. Taking his sketch pad and a box of drawing pencils out of his backpack, Ned wiped sweat out of his eyes. He felt hot and ice-cold at the same. One quick glance showed him what he feared—the scale pattern had intensified. Now it was dark green-gold and shimmered with its own faint radiance.
For a moment Ned forgot his immediate purpose and gaped at the markings. He’d gotten so used to them over the years that they no longer gave him the willies when he saw them, but now, here in this place of violence and terror and death, he was frightened to his very soul.
Ned licked his dry lips and put the sketch pad in his lap. He pulled out a pencil, touched up its point with a sharpener, and then held it lightly in his fingers, just above the paper.
“Draw me the magic,” he whispered.
Chapter 13
April 1965
Ned sat still as stone, barely breathing. His pulse pounded in his wrists and neck as he waited. He hadn’t done this in so long, he wondered if it would even happen.
The air inside the grove was perfectly still, the surrounding woods holding its breath. A sliding, skittering noise passed through the underbrush behind him, and a shudder went through the ground, not unlike the minor earth tremors he’d felt in his years living on the west coast. Ned moistened his lips. His hands were trembling, but he sat unmoving.
Twigs snapped and leaves rustled off to his right, as if a large body had intruded itself into the tangle of Muscadine. The ground shuddered again, and Ned could hear breathing from some large creature just behind him. Shivering, he kept his eyes focused on the paper, and his hand began to move.
He now understood, from having encountered a fair number of psychics and seers during his stint in San Francisco, that what he was doing was a form of automatic writing, or in his case, drawing. He was channeling something, to use the terms of the trade. Just what that something was, he’d been afraid to ask when he was small, but now that he had a better idea of what it might be, he was even more fearful.
He felt the serpentine presence filling him up, flowing down through the top of his head, through his neck, down his shoulder, along his right arm, and into his hand as it gripped the pencil. Ned had stopped breathing as his consciousness stepped aside, curling itself up, suspended in a hazy ball of Ned-ness. An alien presence poured into his mind and moved his body, drawing a design he had sketched before, but not in this much detail. He watched, detached, as the image unfolded, black lines on white paper, flat and yet somehow three-dimensional.
It was an elongated oval, leaf-shaped, yet rounder and heavier, if an image could have weight. The pencil point shaded the edges of the oval and stippled the surface, and he began to realize it was a stone, shaped and carved to a specific purpose. Over the surface of the stone designs emerged as Ned’s hand moved over the paper, drawing the images with deft, sure strokes. Double serpents in wavy parallel lines ran up one side of the stone, over the top, and down the other side, forming an elongated U. Inside the top of the U floated seven tiny spirals. Under them was crouched a dog, teeth bared. Abstract designs filled the space at the bottom of the stone, along with several sorcery symbols to protect the stone from theft or destruction. As soon as all the elements of the design were completed, Ned’s hand went limp, and he felt the presence flow out of his body like air out of a balloon.
His body convulsed and spasmed from the retreat of the invading presence. He’d sensed it dampening its energy field just low enough to wear his human suit for the minutes needed to draw the picture. His arms glowed olive green with a faint golden sheen, and his entire torso itched beyond endurance. Pulling up his T-shirt, he saw with a shock that his shoulders and chest were covered with the scale design. More frightening, however, was the faint glowing umbilicus that emerged from his body just above the navel and stretched out horizontally in a thin shimmering line. It undulated slightly in the patches of sunlight, as if responding to unseen vibrations. Transfixed, Ned saw that it floated over the destroyed house and vanished into the trees beyond.
The pencil and paper fell from his hands as Ned sat slack-jawed, staring with unblinking eyes along the sightline of his spirit cord. Voices murmured in his head, one of them elevating to a loud honking-hiss that made his blood run cold. But at that moment he was beyond moving or seeing; he simply registered the sound in his mind and let it pass through him. The landscape around him was fading.
Ned realized with a jerk that he was no longer sitting, but standing, looking down at his stupefied body as it slumped against the tree trunk. The glowing spirit cord emanating from his solar plexus flowed through his standing body, and when he stepped away toward the trees, the thin glowing line reeled out as if he were a fish on a line.
As he went toward the heaps of charcoal that had once been a structure of pine and oak, he sensed several presences occupying the burned space. Ned passed through them, only peripherally aware of their waves of rage and sorrow momentarily directed toward him. The shining line continued to stretch out from his body as he advanced into the trees where the sunlight faded into black night.
Ned emerged from the grove of oaks into a landscape of red cliffs and wind-sculpted monoliths, their tortured shapes the product of eons of weather chewing and gouging at their sandstone surface. The night sky was lit by an enormous bonfire that flared like an earthbound sunspot, its bright tongues of flame arching and falling in a shower of sparks back into the pyre of brush and the trunks of trees. A ring of dancers, all wiry brown men at least ten feet tall with painted bodies and tasseled headdresses painted in symbols of smoke and clouds, shuffled, leapt, stomped, and twirled with rhythmical precision. Ceremonial smoke bathed the dancers as the bonfire blazed up higher than their heads. Clack-sticks and the low drone of a didjeridu sounded in his head and resonated in the marrow of his bones. He wasn’t simply surrounded by the sound; he had become the subsonic tone that rose and fell and yelped like an animal.
The sound rumbled along the ground and toppled a couple of the sandstone monoliths, but the dancers continued to jump and leap, oblivious of their surroundings. Ned felt the bones of the earth splinter and separate as the tone cleaved the elements that held their shapes together. And then, a monstrous dingo, taller than the dancers and transparent enough for Ned to see the outlines of the bluffs behind it, burst through the ring of dancers. One great leap and it landed in the bonfire, scattering coals. The Dingo Ancestor snapped at the flames with red-stained fangs, allowing itself to be consumed by the fire until there was nothing but a glowing lump of rock where it had crouched.
The dancers stopped as one body. The tallest with the highest conical headdress stepped forward and reached out with both hands, retrieving the object from the coals. He turned to the group and held up the talisman for all to see, proclaiming in a high voice words of wisdom for the witnesses of the miracle that had just taken place. Although Ned could not fathom their language, an understanding of the event flowed into his mind. The Dingo Ancestor had given his clan group a sacred tjuringa to take back to the human world for their safekeeping. And he knew without seeing it what images were engraved on its surface.
Suddenly, he felt a sharp tug at the spirit cord connected to his solar plexus. Without warning, his consciousness began to slide along the line like an electrical impulse and, picking up speed, it landed with a jolt back in his body. Ned toppled over and lay on his back, staring up into the flaming red eyes of the most hideous dog-shaped creature he could ever have imagined. It did not have the majesty of the Dingo Ancestor he had just seen, but was instead a travesty of that one’s beauty, a horrible lower-world mockery of a celestial archetype.
“Die!” it demanded in a guttural voice that was not quite growling and not quite speaking.
“Gahhhhhh!” Ned rolled away from the beast and scrambled to his feet. The dog-creature leapt at him again, crashing against one of the massive oaks as Ned fell to the ground. Propelled by terror, Ned ran headlong into the thicket containing the charred timbers of the old cracker cabin, falling to his knees in a shivering, shaking crouch, waiting for death to strike. Instantly, he was surrounded by shrieks and the sound of timbers falling and fire crackling. The demon-dog turned and lifted its bloody lips over its teeth, questing and tasting the air. Then to Ned’s horror, he watched it stand up on its hind legs and slowly stretch into a blurred humanoid shape. The more it went vertical, the less defined its outline became, much the way Ned might have blended the edges of a charcoal drawing with his fingers.
It was now as tall as the overhanging limbs of the oaks, looking around with a small bulbous head whose only distinguishable features were two white-ringed, lidless eyes. Then it turned in his direction and spoke in a familiar voice.
“Neddy, my boy. Why are you hiding?”
Ned clapped his hands over his ears, but the hateful voice continued.
“Come die like a nice boy. Come, Neddy.”
His chest pounding almost beyond endurance, Ned cowered on his knees, clutching his chest. Was he having a heart attack? The pain was unbearable.
The loathsome man-thing was coming toward him, a black smudge against the tree canopy. But then it began to gibber, losing its voice and lapsing into something more closely resembling an animal’s howl.
“Nonono, not yet, noooooooo!” Then it was gone.
Absolute silence filled the clearing. Lifting his head in spite of the excruciating pain in his midsection, Ned scanned the trees and underbrush for movement or sound, but the forest was as still as when he’d first sat down. Ned confronted the evidence of his watch and realized, stunned, that several hours had passed. His chest hurt so much he thought he might pass out.
“No proper Senior Knowledge-man bin jump back in his body like that.” The reproving voice in his head was the other one, the one that held the terror at bay. “You can follow the spirit cord out like a proper initiated man, but you can’t find your way back in without nearly killing yourself.” The voice cluck-clucked its disapproval.
Ned crawled out of the thicket and collapsed beside his sketchpad, staring at the drawing. “What’s that thing?” he gasped, fighting for breath.
“Dingo clan tjuringa,” said the Taipan Ancestor. She slithered across the clearing toward Ned and rose up in front of him, her smooth olive-golden body gleaming in the afternoon sun.