Authors: Anne C. Petty
The scene rippled, and with a shock, she stood in a man's body, lean, sinewy, of medium height with longish sandy brown hair whipping in the wind that blew up over the lip of the cliff. He wore khaki walking shorts and a thin T-shirt that clung to his body. He peered over the edge. "It's down there somewhere," he said, his words flying away on the wind.
The Senior Law woman waited, the Dingo and Taipan Ancestors holding silent vigil behind her. Reading the man’s thoughts, Alice panicked as she realized what he was about to do. "Noooo!" she screamed in her mind. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then to her relief, he turned and stepped away from the edge.
Alice blinked, and realized she still stood in the circle, her hands in those of the Snake Clan’s shaman, the Senior Law woman, her great-great-grandmother.
You come far to see the truth. Alice felt rather than heard the words brush through her mind. Big Boss Wandjina say we make you see. The woman held Alice’s hands out, palm up. To her horror, the Taipan Ancestor pierced her hand with sudden fangs. Before she could even think to scream, the Dingo Ancestor bit down on her wrist. All went black and freezing cold for a second or two, then suffocating warmth enveloped her body and dust filled her mouth.
Alice found herself inside a cavern lit by a single flashlight. The air was stale and musty, and she wore the man’s body again. He held the flashlight over his head, illuminating a painted figure at least ten feet high. She recognized it as a sorcery figure depicting a death curse placed on someone, and beside it towered the dark red stick figure of a Quinkan. A series of red hand stencils ran in a horizontal line underneath its feet.
Alice coughed in the fetid air and tasted blood. She touched her hand to her mouth and felt pain, then saw blood on her fingers, only they weren’t her fingers. They belonged to the man’s body.
Faintly, she heard a woman screaming. Coursing the direction of the sound, she saw a disheveled young woman’s head and shoulders emerging from an opening high up on the rock wall. The woman looked familiar … Suzanne! Then Alice knew whose body she inhabited. She’d been mentally chasing him for more than thirty years and now, and not only had she found him, she was him. At least, she was inside his mind and body, experiencing what he was seeing and feeling.
She reeled from the waves of horror that coursed through him and then saw why. The Quinkan, wearing the guise of Gaiya the Devil-Dingo whom Alice knew from Dreamtime legend, was balanced on its hind legs not five feet away. Disoriented, she couldn’t understand what was going on, but before she could make sense of the scene, Ned tackled the monster and fell heavily to the ground. Alice’s mind was a blur of pain, fear, and rage as she fought in Ned’s body with the Quinkan. She screamed soundlessly as his leg was ripped apart by its teeth and his body tossed into the air.
At that moment, Ned was gripped by a blinding flash of pain so intense it nearly unseated Alice from his body. She experienced with him the terror and ecstasy of the ritual evisceration, death, and rebirth that an Aboriginal Clever man undergoes when he becomes a seer. Alice felt first-hand the total panic and confusion in Ned’s mind the moment it happened and the subsequent power flowing into him from his conjoinment with the Rai. They formed a curtain of pale light, rippling against the cave wall.
His mind, which moments ago had been a maelstrom of grief and rage, had now become as still as the waters of a lagoon. Alice felt the impact as his body hit the wall, pummeled by the devil-dingo’s massive bulk, yet Ned’s mind remained focused. He immediately reached overhead and fitted one palm over the largest hand stencil, and with his other hand he grasped the Quinkan by the heavy scruff of its neck. At once, the power of the Rai streamed through him into the painted images, fusing his body with the ancient sandstone. Alice screamed inside her own head as Ned’s limbs turned to stone.
Looking out through his dazed eyes, she saw that more accurately Ned’s flesh and blood, and that of the Quinkan, were being absorbed into the rock itself. Within seconds it was over, and where they had once struggled against the wall, Alice could see only a scuffle of dirt on the cavern floor. The Rai were nowhere to be seen, and the cavern was pitch black except for the pool of light where the flashlight had fallen. It took her a moment to understand what had happened to Ned, and then the terrible truth dawned on her: she was looking out of the rocks at the interior of the chamber. She could hear Suzanne sobbing and moaning in complete hysteria somewhere in the darkness. The Quinkan’s guttural mutterings were muffled but unmistakable, and Alice could sense its quivering malice close beside her.
“Damn your entire bloodline,” it gibbered from inside the rock matrix, but the essence that had been Ned was now firmly anchored in the molecules and atoms of the alluvial sandstone, and it cared nothing for empty challenges and curses. It held the Quinkan’s raw hunger in a vise that would not be loosened until the Dingo Clan tjuringa was restored to its rightful place on the shelf beside a quartz spear point. She also felt, through Ned’s remaining synapses, another distant tug, and saw for one brief flash a burned and blackened face, distorted in rage but easily identifiable to her.
Alice’s horrified consciousness struggled to free itself from the fading shreds of thought and feeling that had once been Ned, desperate to escape before she too was irreversibly absorbed into the rock. Father! she screamed. There was a moment’s suspension, as if all the protons and electrons of every atom holding the wall solid had lost their charge.
The Alice who was bound up in her father’s small eddy-pool of the space-time continuum winked out of existence and gradually, inevitably, the twenty-first-century Alice, whose birthday was September 8, took hold of her consciousness, reassembled herself, and opened her eyes.
It was several minutes before she could move her fingers and toes and process fully where she was. The sensation of Dawg licking her hand finally brought her around, and she hugged his neck, breathing his doggy smell. Drained, she sat unmoving, the monstrous book of her ancestor still open in her lap as tears fell on Dawg’s fur in silent lament for Ned, whom she’d found and lost in the blink of a cosmic eye.
Unsteady, Alice crawled to the pile of dry leaves and newspaper. Opening the box of matches, she set the paper on fire and nursed the blaze until it burned high enough to heat her face. Then she reached for the notebook. She tore the book apart and fed it to the flames page by page until it was completely gone. She then tossed the shoebox in as well.
Alice shivered, her skin freezing, and leaned as close to the flames as she dared. The sun was setting by the time she smothered the fire with dirt and kicked the remaining ashes around to make sure no coals remained. Then she knelt down and hugged Dawg around his shaggy neck.
“Thanks for sticking with me,” she croaked, her throat scratchy and dry.
Wiping her eyes, she stood, gathered up the beach towel, and then stopped. There was no pain in her foot. She knelt down and unwrapped the bandages, holding her breath. What had been a ragged red and purple wound was now faint and disappearing. She touched the spot with trembling fingers and found the skin oddly cool instead of fevered. Are you really gone, then? she wondered. Tucking the beach towel under her arm, Alice headed toward the trail, walking swiftly along the path at first and then breaking into a run as she saw the outline of the house through the trees. Dawg galloped ahead of her, announcing their return in joyful yelps as he spotted Nik and Margaret leaning over the deck railing.
“Mom,” Margaret called, ““Where’ve you been? Why are you running?”
“We were about to go look for you,” said Nik, coming down the stairs to meet her.
Alice dropped the beach towel and flung her arms around him.
“Hej, what’s this for?” he said, hugging her back.
Alice let go of him and collapsed onto the steps, holding her head in her hands. She’d gone in search of the truth, but the breadth of it was more than she could process.
Nik sat down beside her. “What’s wrong? You seemed all right this morning.”
Tears blurred her vision, but Alice blinked them back. She was done crying. “I went down to the pond, and burned Harrow’s notebook. It’s gone now.”
Margaret slid down beside her.
“Before I burned it, I used it.”
“Oh shit,” Margaret yelped. “Kinigar warned me.”
“I’ll explain, if you promise to just listen and not judge.”
Nik’s eyes tightened around the corners, but he nodded.
“Tell,” breathed Margaret.
Alice held out her hands. “My fingers got numb while I was holding the book. I wondered if Ned had felt the same, and in the next breath I was out of my body. I saw … and felt what happened to Ned in Australia. He fought the Quinkan in an underground cavern. They were both… I don’t know how to describe it… transformed by some Aboriginal sorcery that was down there, painted on the wall. I was in his body, so I experienced his death.”
“Mom.” Margaret’s eyes were black pools.
Alice plowed on. “Ned did something that may explain why the Quinkan won’t go away. He didn’t know how to undo what had been done by Harrow, who was his grandfather, so he took the Quinkan inside the rock wall with him, to trap it there forever, I guess. But I see now that it bound the thing even more tightly to his bloodline. So when Harrow materialized in this world again, the Quinkan came with him. Ned almost got it right about breaking the binding spell—but not quite.”
Alice took a deep breath and bowed her head. She wondered how long it would take Margaret to figure out the dark shaman who’d terrorized them both was her great-great-grandfather. She decided to shelve that little shocker for another day, when she had the strength. Right now, she’d gone as far as she could.
“I don’t even care if you believe me or not,” she said, “I know what I saw. While I’m at it, I may as well tell you what really happened in Gull Harbor. The Quinkan killed Hal. It was up in the attic when I got there.”
She looked at Nik, but he was silent, his face neutral, which was to be expected. At least he didn’t get up and walk away.
“I have a confession, too,” said Margaret. “I saw the Quinkan at camp, but I didn’t tell anybody. I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea, but now I wish I had. And I channeled for the first time, too. Kini says it probably runs in the family, being psychic like that. It might go all the way back to your dad.”
“Further,” Alice said, the horror of the cave playing again in her mind.
She cut her eyes at Nik. “Your thoughts?”
Nik studied the backs of his hands. “I need to say up front that I can’t make myself believe in Quinkans or Dreamtime magic. I just can’t. But I’ll listen. I don’t want to be left out.”
Alice leaned against him. “Fair enough. I know you’re not a believer. I wouldn’t be either if I hadn’t seen these things myself. As long as you want to be with me, and Margaret, that’s all I ask.”
They sat on the steps, a silent trio, until Alice finally said, “What I really want is access to a bona fide Aboriginal shaman, one of those shriveled old senior men who lives in the Outback and knows everything about the Dreamtime and how it manifests in the here and now. Fat chance. They’ve all been wiped out by white man’s culture.”
“No, they haven’t. I know somebody who knows one,” said Margaret, her eyes bright. “I’ll e-mail him tonight, if you want.”
Alice looked from Margaret to Nik. “What are you talking about?”
Margaret blushed to the roots of her hair. “I told you. His name is Kinigar, and he’s wicked cool. Somebody in his family, an uncle I think, is one of those senior dudes.”
Alice stared at Margaret and for once in her life was entirely speechless. Whatever else Margaret had done at camp, she had grown up, and Alice had been so wrapped up in her own drama she’d failed to see it.
“Yes,” she said, “I would like to meet your Kinigar. If he could find me an Aboriginal man or woman who’s willing to share Dreamtime knowledge with a stranger, I’d be beyond grateful.” She had so many questions that needed answers. She knew the cave where Ned died was a mortuary chamber, full of dark sorcery. From those brief moments in Ned’s consciousness, she’d gleaned that a clan object, an oval stone, had been stolen from there. Ned had searched for it and never found it, but she was beginning to think she knew where it was. The image of the church floor plan with its four cornerstones was sharp in her mind. Did she have the courage to go there and dig?
“I know you’ll love him,” Margaret was saying. “Kini’s just… total win.”
Alice pulled her thoughts away from caves and totems, and gave Margaret her full attention. “And just how much about all this did you tell this boy?”
Margaret’s eyes were shining. “Everything.”
“Did you know about this?” Alice turned to Nik.
Nik shook his head. “But my intuition tells me it’s okay.”
Alice leaned against him. “You don’t have intuitions. That’s my job.” She relaxed a notch, daring to think he might be right.
Margaret got up and faced them. “Well, now that’s settled, can we go eat?” Alice startled. In the failing light Margaret’s eyes were wide and black. “I’m sooooo hungry.”