Authors: Anne C. Petty
Margaret had been her unwavering ally through the whole fiasco because, as Margaret had confessed to Alice, she’d known without doubt the wild dog big as a pony that hid in their woods was the same shape-shifter who met and taunted her in her nightmares. In fact, Margaret had been talking to it since early childhood; she just hadn’t told anyone. Sometimes it appeared to her as a scruffy dingo, sometimes a blood red lizard, and sometimes just a dirty smear of shadow that Margaret could barely see. She further revealed that it came and went from her closet, mostly before she was fully awake. Raine had suggested they both read up on psychic phenomena and had loaned them some books.
Alice agreed that knowledge was power and, as a result of what she’d read, burned her book manuscript with the hope it would incinerate the tie that bound Harrow to her waking world. That was the point at which Namarrkun had arrived, trailing chaos and destruction.
To carry on day to day in the months that followed, Alice and Margaret had taken their cue from Nik, the nonbeliever, and tried to pretend there was a physical or mental explanation for everything they’d gone through.
But now Alice opened her mouth and felt the chanting resonance of the Kungkarangkalpa. The dingo bone amplified vibrations through her mind and body, shaking the foundations of that pulsing collection of atoms known in another dimension as Alice Waterston. Her identity was slipping away again, dissolving in the swirling, circling song of the Pleiades Ancestors. She was panicking in slow motion, powerless to do anything except intone the long notes into the seamless dark.
Turning slowly, atom by atom, she faced a wall of stone. In it, a man’s frozen body glistened, arms wrapped around a darker splotch on the rock. The creation song thundered in her ears, as she stared, uncomprehending. He seemed familiar. Was he someone she should know? She reached out to touch him.
A hand suddenly gripped her shoulder, too hard it seemed–her frozen body cracked into a mosaic of splintered ice. She was disintegrating.
“Alice!”
Strong hands were shaking her to pieces. Her eyelids fluttered, thawing.
“Mom! Wake up!”
Alice shuddered and opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor of her mother’s bedroom, with one canine and three human faces hovering above her. She rolled over, coughing.
Nik knelt beside her, his hands supporting her shoulders. Carlisle licked her neck. Hal’s face was creased into a frown of worry. “Alice, what happened to you?”
She sat up, disoriented. “I have no idea. I was sitting on the edge of the bed and then sort of blacked out.”
“We found you lying on the floor,” said Margaret.
Nik helped her to her feet and kept his arm around her. “We couldn’t tell if you were passed out or just asleep.”
“Yeah, you were breathing really loud.” Margaret was staring at Alice with that look that signaled alarm—the pupils of her ginger eyes had gone wide.
“Excuse me,” Alice said and lurched for the bathroom. Shutting the door, she looked at her face in the mirror from all angles. Her nose was perfectly normal, no perforation. What the fuck? Alice felt sick to her stomach. She’d had a shock like this once before—she’d written about an injury Harrow supposedly inflicted on one of his followers and immediately experienced the sensation herself. It’d shocked her senseless, yet she could find no visible evidence of it on her body at the time. She’d rationalized it as a product of her overactive imagination, but here it was, happening again.
She sat down on the toilet lid and leaned her head against the sink, trying to get her atoms collected. Although she sat in the bathroom of twenty-first century reality, that other world clung to her like a gray fog. She got up and promptly threw up in the toilet bowl.
“Mom, are you okay?” Margaret was pounding on the bathroom door. “Can I come in?”
Alice flushed the toilet and opened the door just enough to pull Margaret inside.
“I need to talk to you,” Alice said, taking a glass from the medicine cabinet and rinsing her mouth out. She took a washcloth off the shelf and bathed her face. Finally, she turned to Margaret.
“It’s happening again,” she said, holding onto the edge of the sink.
“Uh oh.” Margaret’s eyes were deep black.
“I think I went out of body … like before.” Alice was shaking and found it hard to get the words out. She wrapped her arms around her chest, clutching her sides and wondering if she would ever be warm again.
“You looked like you were passed out,” Margaret said, wary.
“The last thing I remember clearly was sitting on the edge of Grandma Suzanne’s bed and staring at the floor. Then the bottom dropped out.” Alice kept shivering.
Margaret closed the toilet lid and sat down. “Let me know if you need this again.”
Alice wet her face again with the washcloth.
“Are you gonna be okay now?” Margaret’s voice sounded tight, controlled, but not scared.
Alice relaxed a tiny bit. Thank the gods for Margaret—Raine had called her an old soul in a child’s body. Alice didn’t know about that, but she did know that Margaret was the closest thing to a best friend and confidant she had. At times they felt more like siblings than parent and child.
Alice looked at Margaret. “In this dream state or whatever it was, somebody poked a hole in my nose and put a bone through it, and it resonated so loud it started pushing my body apart. I felt that whole experience with every nerve, but do you see any marks?”
Margaret shook her head.
“Right, neither do I.” Alice ran her hands through her hair. “Do me a favor, will you, and don’t tell Nik or Uncle Hal.”
“Alice? What’s going on?” Hal’s muffled voice from the bedroom was urgent.
She looked at herself in the mirror again, smoothed her hair, and opened the bathroom door. “I’m all right now. Must have been something I ate. I’m over it now. Can I have another glass of lemonade?”
Hal looked her over, doubt in his eyes. “Certainly.” He went to the living room and left the three of them standing together.
Nik put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. “Are you ill?”
“Hell if I know.”
“What does that mean?”
She bit her lip. “It means, let’s just get this business over with and go home.”
Following Hal out to the living room, she added, “I really wouldn’t mind if I never came back here again.”
Chapter 6
August 1956
Ned stood at the edge of the clearing. Sundown. Dry heat scorched the parking area in front of the windswept tent. Brown dust devils whipped dirt toward beat-up vans and trucks, an old Packard station wagon missing its hubcaps, and a few nicer cars jammed in front of Brother Micah’s Southern Tent Revival.
“Gloryhalleluiahamenbrother praiseJesuspraiseJesus … praiseJesus!” Voices of the faithful peaking, falling, then building again toward climax. And over the top a strident nasal voice Ned assumed must be Brother Micah. Or maybe a lieutenant, if Brother Micah already had his hand in the box. He understood how this worked. He’d heard it all before, a lifetime ago.
Ned shivered in the heat, rubbing his arms through his long-sleeved shirt. Tall and rail-thin, he hitched up his pants and cast a look over his shoulder into the trees. Nothing he could see, but his arms and chest stung like he’d taken a nap on an ant bed. The demon stalked the fringes of his perception, sometimes serpentine, sometimes just a shadowy smear. He didn’t figure anybody else could see it, but he wouldn’t bet money on that. He saw it plenty good enough, mostly in his fitful dreams but occasionally in broad daylight.
Which was why he was here in hot, dusty Texas instead of dark and sultry Louisiana where he’d been the past year. How long had it taken him to get here, coming full circle to witness that spectacle of belief and terror from childhood that he hated most in the world? For Ned, counted time had crawled by with little attachment to dates, but he reckoned he’d been on his own for close to three years. Not such a bad accomplishment, when he stopped to think about it.
After his desperate escape from mosquito-bitten Florida, he’d hooked up with migrant workers heading to Chilton County, Georgia to pick peaches, strawberries, and sweet Vidalia onions. He’d fit in okay with the crew, who took him for an odd Tex-Mex mix with his olive-golden skin and tawny hair that threatened to bush out all over his head unless he kept it razored close to his skull. The only thing that mattered to them was that he didn’t look one hundred percent Anglo, which meant he could get in line at soup kitchens and climb into pickup trucks heading out to the onion fields without too much of a wayward glance. He would come back to the migrant camps in the evening, covered in gray-brown dust from bending over the onion beds in ninety-degree heat, his long-sleeved sweat-soaked shirt clinging to his body like another skin. Conditions were primitive, some said inhumane, but it was nothing different from what he’d grown up with–no plumbing or electricity, just the oppressive heat and drone of insects in summer or brief but sharp bouts of cold in winter.
Following the migrants on their seasonal odyssey, he’d drifted from Georgia to Alabama to the Carolinas and back without much ambition, just going where the vegetable farms and orchards were hiring and where his thumbed rides took him. Sometimes he stayed a while in those places, depending on whether there was a job he could do without drawing too much attention to himself. He was mostly homeless.
In 1954, he’d joined a crew working the strawberry harvest on a farm not far from Atlanta. It was early April and the dogwoods were clouds of white on slender gray-brown branches. Consuela and her brother Manolo, friends he’d worked with all season long, had persuaded him to go with them in Mano’s battered pickup over to Atlanta for the Dogwood Festival. It was an arts and crafts shindig held each spring in Piedmont Park. Consuela wanted to hear the live music and Mano just wanted a change of scenery. Ned could sell his drawings, they’d argued, when he’d balked at the idea of big crowds and curious people. But he’d gone with them in the end, and that day—especially that night—became etched in Ned’s brain forever.
It was true what Mano’d said—people were willing to pay Ned good money for his little drawings of peach blossoms and wooded hillsides. But more lucrative than these were the quick-sketch likenesses he could draw of children, pets, families, boys trying to impress girlfriends, and sharp guys decked out in fancy suits and fedoras with pencil-slim gals latched onto their arms.
By the time the Contreras siblings were ready to call it a day, Ned had enough money to buy some serious whisky. Mano had done the actual buying, of course, Ned being underage. Back in their tiny shack in the migrant camp, squeezed among others just like it, they’d quickly drained one bottle of Johnny Walker and started on another. By the time the whisky slammed into his cerebellum big time, Ned knew he’d made a cold, hard mistake, the kind there was no backing away from, because he felt it coming at him full tilt. He fell to the rough plank floor of the shack and buried his head between his knees.
“Hah!” the creature hissed in his ear. “Gotcher attention now, Neddy-boy.” Even through clinched eyelids he could see the red eyes inches from his face, smell its fetid, blood-soaked breath up his nostrils.
“Eh, Ned, whatsa matter?” Consuela was smiling a big alcohol-blurred grin. “You’re not gonna be sick on the floor, are ya?”
“Cut him some slack, he’s just a kid. Probly never been fallin’ down drunk before. Right, amigo?” Mano touched his shoulder all friendly like, but Ned slapped it away.
His head came up. “Don’t…don’t—” he croaked, scrambling away on his knees, away from…what?
“Shit, it’s just me,” Mano said, sort of smiling, sort of not.
“I…I can’t tell.” Ned knew the creature could mimic human voices perfectly, all the better to lure them into whatever black hole passed for its lair. What it did with them after that, he didn’t want to imagine.
The shack was awash in shadow, the single oil lamp on a low table throwing everything into sharp-angled relief. A hand reached and grabbed his shirt front. Ned went into overdrive, punching and thrashing as if the very devil had hold of him.
Manolo switched from cool drunk amigo to pissed-off Mexican in a single breath. “What the shit, man? You cruisin’ for a bruisin’, hombre.” He punched back.
A moving shadow leaped along the wall, and Ned lunged away from it. The table jostled, the lamp toppled over. Oil spread. Caught fire. Other flames flared in his memory. Ned was screaming, or maybe that was Consuela…he couldn’t tell.
He’d hopped a boxcar headed south by the time the embers were cold.
* * *
After that, Ned kept moving. Day-to-day subsistence was a challenge, but he relished his independence, hard as it was. At age nineteen, he felt he could take pretty good care of himself, minus the shapeshifter that dogged his trail. He’d sworn off alcohol completely after that terrible night in the migrant camp. Clearly it brought his defenses down, and he had no desire to hear that rasping voice with its hissing tongue so close to his ear again. Although he was dimly aware of its malice, the creature had retreated for the most part, as if it kept vigil from a distant hilltop. The scale marks on his skin had begun to fade, and Ned rested more easily.
What had led him to knock on the door of the tiny office behind Delphine’s Soul Food in New Orleans in search of a job he couldn’t say. Delphine Savoie, expert cook and voudou priestess, had put him to work washing dishes in her tiny café in the French Quarter, and it was she who’d shoved him onto the path that led eventually to Brother Micah. Which meant his dishwashing employment lasted just a few weeks. He’d felt sorry about that, having to leave the eatery before he’d even learned the names of the regulars who came for dirty rice and ham hocks topped with okra and tomatoes and a side of corn fritters laced with chipotle peppers. But when she’d spotted those faint scale-like designs below his rolled-up sleeves, the jig was up. She’d hauled him through her office, asked him what the markings were, and then in a full-on panic dragged him out the back door and pushed him into the alley, wild-eyed. Actually, the dragging and pushing had happened after she’d held him by the arms for several jagged heartbeats and gotten a second-sight glimpse of his hidden companion.