Authors: Anne C. Petty
“Hey you, goddammit!”
The bird had pecked him with its sharp little beak. It pecked again and he recoiled, letting go of the spirit cord, which vanished the moment his fingers gave way.
“Fuck, no!” He stumbled forward in the dark, the water dragging at his knees. Ned couldn’t tell if the cord had just lost its luminescence or if it had really disappeared, but thrash as he might in the general location where’d he’d let go, he couldn’t find it.
A numbing cold crept into his veins, congealing the blood and slowing his heart. He could barely move, and finally he sat down in the water, his hands limp and floating, ripples lapping at his shoulders. His head fell forward until his face touched the swirling pool. He wondered how long it would take him to drown if he didn’t lift his face to breathe. He couldn’t remember his purpose or why he’d been so worried over a piece of rock that no longer held any meaning for him. He was becoming part of the lagoon, his consciousness fading, his humanity drifting away in the black water.
Something solid bumped against his shoulder, nearly pushing him over. Ned raised his dripping head and saw the vague outline of a canoe drifting beside him. He touched it with his hands; it was rough, like the bark of a tree. The idea penetrated his brain that if he climbed in, the canoe might take him somewhere. He grasped its curved side and tried to stand, then froze. The canoe was occupied.
A tall, impossibly thin brown man with a wild shock of curly hair that spiraled out from his head like a halo stood in the center of the canoe, an upright spear held in both hands. He stood on one leg, the foot of the other leg resting against the supporting knee. A sounding bone pierced the septum of his nose, and he stared straight at Ned with shining eyes.
“Long way coming,” he said, his voice soft and liquid, like streams over pebbles. “You bin no blackfella, but here you are. Where’s the clan tjuringa you carried?”
“I-I don’t know,” Ned said between his chattering teeth.
“You bin get in the boat, eh?” At this, a sound began, a single subsonic note held long, then subsiding, then pulsing outward again. Ned knew at bone-level it was the note of creation blown through the first Ancestor’s bloodwood didjeridu—the great I AM that sang all the creatures of Earth into life and breath.
“Would you go to the island, then?” The boatman shifted his spear to one hand, put his foot down beside the other, and reached out to Ned. “Say me your name.”
Alarm coursed through Ned’s body because he knew what the “island” meant. It was the land of the dead.
“I don’t want to die.” The droning sound coursed through his body, making ripples across the surface of the lagoon. A patina of overtones hung above the anchoring pedal note, dipping in and out, zooming along in synch with the bottom tone and then flying away from it, singing the rock wallaby and the barramundi and the honey ant into the Great Making.
“Well, then.” The boatman withdrew his hand. “This poor fella bin lost his cord and his stone. Can’t come in the boat and can’t go back.” He stood impassively staring down at Ned, as if the matter was settled and he had no further duty here.
“Can’t you at least send me back?” Ned pleaded, panicked.
The boatman stood still as if carved from the primal eucalyptus, smooth and bronze and shining. The boat began to drift away.
“Wait!” Ned cried out. “Don’t leave!” He strained his eyes, trying to see the dim outline of the canoe and its rider as they receded into the gloom. Thrashing about in the water, Ned shouted with all his strength. “Send me back! Help me!”
A murmuring filled his head, voices he remembered from … when? Where? He ransacked his addled memory, looking for the time or place when he’d heard those voices.
Who comes seeking the Rai? What skin group? A voice whispered and curled around his ear like mist.
He met Death but chose not to go, said a second. More joined in, filling Ned’s mind with a hushed chatter.
Then he saw them approaching, a throng of ovoid-shaped lights, some tall as willows and others small as an egret. They formed a ring around him.
We are the Rai. Who calls?
Ned stood as straight as he could manage. “My name is Ned.”
This name means nothing. What skin group? The voice sounded in his head.
Ned turned around in the knee-deep water. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Help me.”
The tallest of the Rai approached, gliding over the surface of the pool. Amoeba-like, an extension that might be called an arm flowed out and touched Ned on the chest and then on the arms. Snake clan, Taipan mother, it said. You bin marked, but you are not karadji.
“What’s a karadji?” asked Ned, desperate.
Wise man, clever man, one who sees far, spirit-master, one who makes the spirit-journey between worlds, the voices chorused.
“Then it’s true, I’m not a medicine man,” he said, using his only cognate for what they were describing. “I don’t know any magic.”
What is magic? We are the Rai. Why did you call?
Ned was shaking worse than if he’d taken too many uppers. He decided to try a different tack. “I lost something in the water when I let go of the spirit cord. It was a sacred stone, a clan stone. Can you help me find it?”
Instantly the circle closed in. He came for the tjuringa. Open his eyes.
The tallest Rai reached out again and touched Ned on the forehead. A blinding flash seared through his brain and his entire field of vision went white, like staring into the heart of the sun. And he understood. The Rai were spirit guides who trained and protected shamans on their journeys into worlds beyond the physical. They were life’s essence, bodiless, old as Sky Home itself. They came, often unbidden, when a shaman of sufficient power touched the membrane of consciousness that separated the physical world from the beyond. They were the bridge to the Dreamtime.
Blood ties, blood debts, said the Rai. Ned was transfixed, held by the silent struggle inside him and the blinding field of white that obliterated all sight. Two others we see, fused in the blood. Taipan mother and hungry lurker. One protects, the other kills.
Ned felt the two as each surfaced in his mind, and he shivered in terror. “W-what do they want?”
One wants justice, the other, freedom. The Rai can see. This is your birthright, told by the blood.
“Then how did this shit get in my blood? Who gave me this poison?”
That one. Your grandfather.
An image of the blackened, burned creature he’d found in the hut of reeds materialized in his mind, and then he remembered. He’d followed its spirit cord right up to its prison on the gray banks of the billabong.
“He stole this whatever-it-is? So why can’t he give it back?”
The bright form of the Taipan Ancestor materialized before Ned’s face. “He can’t go back. Can’t ever go back. You go back, fix things up.”
Ned’s head was swimming. “Show me the damn thing, then.” Instantly, he saw his own drawing of the leaf-shaped object with the incised symbols. The Taipan Ancestor glistened in his mind, her golden-green scales radiant. “Dingo clan received it, that one from Snake clan mob stole it, hid it. That one,” she hissed at him.
“Where does it belong?”
“Dingo clan home!” His two landscape paintings from his early days in San Francisco took shape in his mind.
The Taipan Ancestor vanished, and his head was filled again with the Rai, little whispering bees buzzing from one side of his skull to the other.
Great Snake Galeru weaves the rainbow. Ungar, Wonungur makes the spirit-children. Worombi, Yurlunggur brings the rain. Julungguf, Langal, Mui, Mindi. Taipan Mother brings the flood, bringer of death, bringer of life.
Ned clapped his hands over his ears. “Stop!” Instantly all was silent and he was alone in the dark. He looked down, and stretching out from his solar plexus was the shining ropelike length of his spirit cord. It flowed away from him horizontally in a straight line, undulating slightly like a plucked guitar string.
He placed his hands on it and started walking, imagining in his mind that he was following it back to his body, to his source, to the world where he belonged.
* * *
“See, Suzie-Q, what did I tell you?” Crash gave Ned a pat on the cheek as he opened his eyes. Ned groaned and tried to sit up.
“Wait, let me help you.” Suzanne put her arms around his shoulders. “God, Ned, you scared me to death. How do you feel?”
“Like shit, but give me a minute.” He swung his feet off the mattress and onto the floor, reaching a hand out to Crash. “Help me up, man.”
Crash pulled him to his feet, and Suzanne slid her arm around his waist. They stood, waiting, while he found his balance.
“I seriously need to piss,” he said. “I can make it to the bathroom okay.”
Suzanne held onto him, helping him maneuver around the bed and toward the door. “Are you sure? You don’t seem too steady to me.”
“So, man, you want one of us to come in and help you?” Crash cut Suzanne a look, and she gave him back what she hoped was a glare that told him in no uncertain terms what she thought of that idea. He backed away. “Yeah, well, I’ll just go back to bed now. Holler if you need me. Which you probably don’t. G’night.” He disappeared into his room and shut the door.
Suzanne let go of Ned, and he gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “I’m okay now. Don’t look so scared.”
She was still alarmed at the gray tinge around his mouth. “I’m going to make some tea, then we need to talk.”
He nodded and walked away toward the bathroom. Suzanne went into the kitchen, filled a glass teapot with water, and then lit the gas under it. Just as it was starting to boil, Ned returned, looking much better. Suzanne could see that his color was back, and he was smiling at her. He reached for her and held her close. She slipped her arms around him and returned the squeeze.
“What would I do without you?” he said.
“I wonder,” she said, her face against his chest. “If it were left up to Crash, you’d be waking up on the floor about now.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. He’s not the mothering type. But you are, and I thank you for that.”
Suzanne turned to the teapot, and poured hot water over herbal tea bags. Stirring in honey and handing a mug to Ned, she headed back to the bedroom.
Sitting on the bed beside him, she watched as he sipped at his tea and shut his eyes. “This is good.”
Suzanne frowned. She was hooked beyond hope on this strange man who seemed one moment to have so much promise and the next to be damaged beyond repair.
“Have you ever seen a doctor about those seizures?”
“Can’t afford it,” he said. “And I honestly don’t believe they’d find anything. A faith healer might be more useful.” He drank more of the tea, and watched her over the cup. She held his eyes.
“What happens when you black out like that? You didn’t go epileptic, you were just out cold. And your skin was cool, too. Do you have low blood pressure or something?”
“Well, there’s an excuse I hadn’t thought of. Yeah, maybe I do. As to where I go when I’m out, my mind takes its own private acid trip. Sometimes I remember after I wake up, other times not.”
“What about this one?”
“I remember it all. Want to hear?”
Suzanne nodded, folding her legs into a more comfortable position. “I want to hear everything.”
Suzanne listened, barely breathing, as he related what sounded like a drug-induced nightmare, from finding himself in the water clutching something he called a spirit cord, to meeting Death the boatman, to the moment when his cord returned and showed him the way back.
Suzanne smiled for the first time that evening. “Would you believe, I actually know something that may help. Galeru is the Rainbow Serpent, from the Dreamtime. Australian Aborigines believe the Rainbow Serpent is their creator. It’s part of their religion. I learned that in my World Mythology class in college.”
“Australia,” he said, chewing his lip. “I’ve been haunted, and hunted, all my life with no clue how to make it stop. But at least now I know where to go, thanks to you. I don’t know how the bloody hell I’m going to get over there, but I’ll figure it out.”
It was funny, Suzanne realized, how easily she’d switched from observer to conspirator. If there was any way to help Ned accomplish this task he believed he had to do, she would make it happen. “I have some money. We can go together.”
“Your family will disown you, especially your brother.”
Suzanne put her arms around his neck and kissed his shapely mouth. “Then let’s make it worth their while. Marry me, Neddy Waterston.”
He kissed her back. “You’ll be sorry, but I accept.”
Chapter 20
August 6, Saturday—Present Day
Margaret stood on the edge of the circle of light, allowing the other presence to take over. Athough stood wasn’t exactly right; hovered was more like it. She could see the dim outline of her body sitting cross-legged opposite Tom. For all she could tell, Tom appeared unfazed by the fact that some alien consciousness had invaded her roommate’s body and was addressing her in a whispery voice. Margaret thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t tried this with anybody else. Tom was way cool and knew what to do.
“Are you Margaret’s guardian?” Tom asked.
Margaret watched, fascinated, as her mouth moved and words came out that weren’t her own. She could also see that the pupils of her eyes were wide and black as she stared unblinking across the circle at Tom.
“We are … guardians, yes …” The words came slowly, just above a whisper, as if the connection was so far away it could barely be received.
“Are you more than one person?”
“We are … many … you may perceive us as one.”
“Where are you from?” asked Tom.
“Sky… Home,” came the answer. Margaret understood instantly, but she was pretty sure that wouldn’t make any sense to Tom.
“Um, how are you connected to Margaret?”
There was a pause. Finally, the words came slowly. “We are … searching the vocabulary of this person … for the words …”