Authors: Anne C. Petty
Her mind was fragged. She’d read that Aboriginals believed experienced shamans could go between worlds on errands for their tribes and come safely back to this one. Was it just a mind trip they went on, or something physical, too? Could a person exist in more than one dimension… and why should anybody even think such a thing was possible?
Alice shut her eyes, thinking. Those who tended the sacred sites, the Senior Aboriginal men and women of High Degree, understood how the Ancestors had infused the places of this earth with their presence. What their rock art taught was that there is no separation between the waking world of humans and the Dreamtime realm of the Ancestors who had created the physical world. It was all one to them, a single continuum of existence.
How was Ned connected to all this? And what did that imply for herself and especially for Margaret? She reached for the aspirin in her desk drawer and gulped a few down without water.
Chapter 17
July 1968
Rockets shot up from the beach and burst overhead in a shower of red, white, and blue stars that flamed out over the Atlantic Ocean. On a clear, moonless night like tonight, the effect was dazzling. The City of Miami had spared no expense for its Fourth of July celebration, including live music, street vendors, arts and crafts, and the requisite fireworks extravaganza that was billed as bigger and better than last year’s show.
Suzanne remembered coming down to South Beach for the Independence Day festivities every year with her family when she was little and with a gang of friends when she was in high school. But this was the first time she’d sat in the sand on the beach and watched the display in the company of a boyfriend.
Well, she couldn’t really call him a boyfriend because she’d discovered that he was nearly eight years older than she. Suzanne frowned, remembering her brother Hal’s reaction; he hadn’t been happy at all when she’d told him about her new love interest. She’d kissed Hal on the cheek and told him to stop being so critical. Not that it mattered; she would see anybody she wanted, family opinions be damned.
They were two weeks into a relationship, and she could tell that Ned wasn’t going away; in fact, he seemed to take it for granted that their attachment was permanent. Such a headlong rush made her uneasy, and she’d said so. He was undeterred. There’d been no further episodes like the one she’d witnessed that first day in his apartment, and she’d convinced herself that what she’d seen in his face was just her stoned imagination at work. All told, things between them had been progressing smoothly, to the naked envy of her friends.
A grand finale of Roman candles exploded, sending multicolored balls and expanding plumes of light high in the sky while set pieces on the ground created fountains of flame and waterfalls of silver and gold in an overwhelming five-minute barrage of light and sound.
The show over, spectators packed up their lawn chairs and wandered back down Ocean Drive while many more stayed on the beach, listening to the music of local bands and taking in the real stars overhead.
“Look, isn’t it beautiful? You see the Milky Way!”
Suzanne leaned against Ned’s shoulder. They sat quietly, comfortable in each other’s company. They had made love for the first time that afternoon, and now Suzanne felt wrapped in that intangible sense of well-being she attributed to being completely in synch, physically and emotionally, with another person.
* * *
Ned put his arm around Suzanne and drew her close. He knew he’d made the right decision about her. But now that he’d found her, what were they supposed to do together, other than the obvious? Her face, in this place, had been sent to him in his trance-drawing state, but what now?
Ned was deep in these thoughts when she’d said something to him about the Milky Way and the stars overhead. It brought him out of his meanderings long enough to note how the sky was dusted with pinpoints of light against a black velvet backdrop. Such a contrast to the lurid colors and surreal cloudbanks that filled the skies of his head-trip art. That art, which his sellers labeled “psychedelic,” was a major part of his livelihood, yet it still frightened him in a way that sometimes froze his blood. He thought of the designs his childish hands had made for his mother: suns with hollow eyes, snakes and spirals and braided waving lines, and upside down stick figures with spears and long phalluses, which he hadn’t recognized as such until he’d become a teenager. He had no idea what they represented, but she claimed the charms made from ashes of the paper he’d drawn on were more potent than ordinary potions. Ned shivered, remembering.
He was feeling ill at ease, which was a bummer, because he should have been relaxed, with a sense of fulfillment. Suzanne was a fine lay and turned out to be much less inhibited than he’d expected. She was intelligent, worldly, and pretty in a small-boned way. He also realized that she reminded him of Mary Catherine, who’d held him in her circle of warmth while he fought for his sanity on the hotel bathroom floor three years ago. On the surface, life here was good. He had a great crash pad, no debts to speak of, and he’d found a woman he was beginning to think long-term thoughts about. So why did he feel like shit?
“Ready to go back?” he asked, brushing his lips over the nape of her neck.
He liked the feel of her arm around his waist, walking back to the hotel, and he hoped Suzanne regarded him as more than just an exotic fuck buddy. She hadn’t been put off by the scale pattern on his forearms, had even claimed they were a turn-on, so why was he so jittery?
“Neddy?” She’d asked him something, but it sailed past him.
“Sorry, baby, I missed that. What did you say?”
Suzanne was looking at him in that direct way of hers. “I just said you seemed spaced out. Are you okay?”
“Nothing a little weed and a back rub wouldn’t fix.” He hugged her slender shoulders. The thought came into his head that she was so slightly built she could be crushed like a dragonfly. He needed to be careful.
“Well, I can’t help with the weed, but I can do the second part,” she said, smiling up at him.
She was so pretty, with her red hair and dark blue eyes. He felt a moment’s pang. She deserved better. Wherever he was headed, it was gonna be a rough ride. But she’d been sent to him, or he’d been pushed toward her, so there it was. Ever since that one awful moment when she’d glimpsed the demon within, he’d kept a tight lid on his psyche.
When they got back to the apartment, the door of the second bedroom was shut, with a Better Living Through Chemistry bumper sticker taped to it.
“Crash is home, I see,” said Ned. No doubt some serious acid test was in progress, so he knew not to disturb.
He gave Suzanne a squeeze. “Why don’t you get some coffee started while I roll up a few jays. Then we’ll have our own private party.”
“Okay, just don’t start without me.”
He watched her heading off to the kitchen, thinking how much he wanted them to be a couple on equal footing and hoping he wouldn’t have to keep his secrets hidden from her too much longer. He pulled a baggie from under the mattress and rolled up a fat joint, using all that was left and eating the few seeds that remained.
Ned put Sketches of Spain, that strangest of Miles Davis albums, on the turntable. It was perfect—jagged and raw, exactly the way he felt inside. He was living in Edge City, man, and this little domestic dance they were performing was only a prelude to some madness he felt but couldn’t see.
Before long, she came in with two steaming mugs. He lit up, and they smoked and drank in silence until the record ended.
“There’s something wrong, isn’t there?” She was staring at him again, trying to look inside. Ned studied the floorboards.
“I don’t even know where to start.” He felt the bones of her hand, thin and birdlike. “I’m very attached to you, Suzanne.”
“Is that a problem? Are you married or something?”
Ned let out a laugh. “No, baby, I’m definitely not married. Never have been.”
She wasn’t smiling. “Then what? Is it my brother? He isn’t thrilled about us, but so what? I’m twenty-three. I do what I want.”
“Your brother is absolutely not my problem. This is.” He showed her the insides of his arms, where the scale design was visible even in the subdued lighting of the bedroom.
She touched his skin, running her fingers over the pattern in a way that made him shiver. The scales were dark enough to appear three-dimensional although the skin was smooth to the touch. He’d rubbed his fingers over those designs too many times himself, trying to understand how and why he’d been marked like that.
She was doing it now, rubbing her fingers against his skin, seeking a texture that wasn’t there. “I did notice that your tattoos had changed color and thought it was kind of strange. I thought maybe you were having an allergic reaction.” She was holding his arm in her lap.
“They aren’t tattoos,” said Ned.
“Then what are they?”
“What would you say if I told you a snake put them on me?”
Suzanne blinked, but didn’t laugh. That was good, because Ned was losing his nerve and had almost decided he’d made a mistake, opening up like that. It was the grass; that stuff was stronger than the last batch Crash sold him.
Suzanne was speaking slowly and carefully, trying, he supposed, to find her way through the cannabis fog to the right words. “I’m willing to believe,” she said, “that there could be some level of existence beyond what we see and touch. Getting stoned gives you a glimpse of what that expanded state might be like. On the other hand, I’ve never had a supernatural experience, so I don’t understand how you could’ve gotten those marks that way. But if you want to tell me how you think it happened, I’m willing to listen.”
“Fair enough.” So then it all came out—how he’d grown up in a Florida swamp with his mother who handled snakes and that he’d helped her until he’d run away from home at age sixteen, then got bitten by a rattler and recovered without hospital treatment, and when he’d finally come to, his skin had changed from freckled and pale to his current olive complexion with the snakeskin designs. He skipped telling her how his forearms had been previously scarred by his mother’s fish-gutting knife. Some day he might get around to explaining that part, but not now. And the exact fate of his mother and what she’d turned into before her death was not going be told to anyone, ever.
Ned got up and retrieved the folder that contained his drawing of Suzanne. “Let me show you this.” He handed her another page, and watched as she held it up.
“What is it?”
“Good question. I have no idea, but I drew it the same day I made that picture of you.”
“It looks like a native shield. Is it African?”
Ned shrugged. “I drew it in that trance I told you about.”
“Drawing the magic,” she said softly. “Can you do it whenever you want? I mean, do the spirits or whatever need to be there when you start to draw?”
Ned let out his breath, relieved she hadn’t bolted for the door.
“No, I can’t, and that’s the worst part. I don’t know why they come when they do. It’s a bad scene. No, it’s worse. The first time it happened, I was only a little kid. It scared me shitless, and I didn’t even know enough to be really scared, because I didn’t have any guidelines for a reality check. Now I do, and I know that something about me is really fucked up.”
Suzanne was squeezing his hand, her attention fixed on his face. “What’s it like, Neddy?” she whispered. “When they come?”
“If I tell you, you might decide Hal’s right, that you shouldn’t get mixed up with me.” Ned tightened his grip. “I’m not a normal person.”
“I knew that when I met you,” she said.
Ned pulled her close, holding her against his chest, her hair in his face. He’d wanted for years to confess his weirdness to somebody, but he’d never dared before now. He’d danced around it with Cecil Rider, but couldn’t give the old man too many details or it would’ve come out that he’d murdered his mother with a shovel to the head because she’d changed into something that talked with her voice but looked like all Hell. He’d gone berserk and didn’t remember the details of how it went down, but in the end he’d stopped the creature and followed his first instinct, which was to burn the house to the ground. It had taken a monumental act of courage to go back there after so many years, but by following that urge he’d been given a vision and what seemed to be a mission. It was that part, figuring out the mission, where Suzanne came in.
“This thing I drew,” he said, “it’s a magical object, some kind of holy grail. In the trance, I saw how it got created for a tribe by one of their gods. Then something happened to it, stolen or something. But really, I’m just guessing. The snake spirit I channeled said I’m supposed to return it. But how can I return something I don’t even have?”
“Why don’t you go into a trance and just ask what it is?”
Ned shook his head. “I’ve tried, and like I said, they don’t answer when I do that, or they’ll give me some damned cryptic vision like I just described to you.” He took a breath. He remembered asking his mother what was wrong with him, but all she’d said was that it was blood magic, which he now understood was probably why she’d wanted to marry his father.
When Suzanne lifted her face, he was tempted to just kiss her and forget about this shit with visions and snake demons, but he was so close to telling what had been withheld for so long that he didn’t want to stop.
“Anything else?” Her eyes looked afraid, but he could tell she wanted to hear.
“When I got the snakebite that I told you about, just before I blacked out, I hallucinated a snake goddess or something that talked to me. I don’t know if she was real or just in my head, but she told me I had to fix something, find something that was missing. I think she saved me, because I woke up days later still alive instead of dead.” He let that sink in.
“Is that what I saw, that first day when we came here—your snake goddess?”