Stoneskin's Revenge (16 page)

And then Calvin told about his dad sneaking off from work to watch Calvin play in Little League, and how he'd comforted him when they'd called him names. It was catharsis, Calvin decided, for both of them. Maybe that was what the omen had meant: that by staying here he could get the sort of outpouring of grief mixed with relief that would otherwise be slow in coming. By the time it was over, both of them were misty-eyed and Robyn's nose was running. She wiped it daintily. “So much for being a tough broad, I guess.”

“We're all soft in the center,” Calvin told her gently. “Either that, or we
have
no center.”

“Yeah,” Robyn yawned. “And tomorrow'll come whatever.”

“Yeah,” Calvin echoed. “Guess it's time we turned in.”

“Guess so.”

The fire had burned to embers by then, and neither of them had any desire to poke it up. Robyn unzipped her sleeping bag and slid inside, fumbled for a moment, then dragged out her jeans, which she rolled into an untidy cylinder and handed to Calvin with the single word “Pillow.”

“Thanks,” Calvin murmured. He slid it under his head, then stretched out on the ground where he was, arms folded across his bare chest, staring at the sky. Brock was a small lump beside him, his back snuggled against Calvin's side, his legs drawn up like a tiny child.

Silence for a while—except for the sounds of the night.

And then Calvin felt a soft touch on the hand he'd cupped around his left elbow. A glance down showed him Robyn's fingers; a shift of his gaze further left revealed her reclining on her elbow looking at him. Their eyes met, and she lifted the flap of the bag a fraction. “There's room for two.”

“I can't,” Calvin whispered, but she did not withdraw the hand from his.

*

But the hand was gone when Calvin awoke sometime later—near midnight, to judge by the position of the moon and the stars. The sky was clear, though the wind still held a hint of rain, and Calvin could just make out the Cygnus corner of the Summer Triangle. For a while he simply lay where he was, wedged between Brock and Robyn, almost as if they were family. It was strange, too, for he'd been sleeping soundly, dreaming something about swimming in Galunlati, and then abruptly he was awake. But what had roused him?

Beside him, Brock stirred and whimpered and frowned in his sleep.

Somewhere to the west a dog barked—far off, but clear. Calvin started full awake at that, and could have kicked himself. He'd been an utter fool. Of
course
a dog had barked—he
was
a fugitive, after all. No way they'd just let him run off in the woods and not look for him. But white men were lazy, were sorry trackers, so they'd naturally use dogs to do their dirty work, and in a little county like this, they'd probably have to bring 'em in from outside. Only…didn't they usually use bloodhounds for stuff like that? And weren't they usually silent? Calvin strained his hearing and caught another set of distant, excited yips. Those certainly didn't
sound
like bloodhounds. Beagles, then, like the ones his dad used to chase rabbits? Except that it was night, which made that unlikely, though not impossible—and they didn't sound quite right to be beagles. More likely it was somebody out 'coon hunting. Only it wasn't season, unless somebody was just out running their hounds to hear them sing; he'd known plenty of people who did that.

He sat up to try to catch the bays and bells more clearly, and made out the deeper, more resonant tones of a treeing walker. 'Coon hunters for sure, he decided; keeping their hounds in tune.

But maybe he ought to investigate, anyway. No telling what'd happen if a bunch of hunters stumbled on him and the runaways. For an instant he thought to rouse his companions and have them abandon their sinkhole hideaway, but something told him
no,
that the cries were too far away to pose much threat.

And then something else caught his attention. He could not tell for certain if it was an actual sound or merely a vibration in the ground, it was so low-pitched. Like rocks sliding together, maybe; like the earth muttering to itself as it cooled. But then he noticed something far more troubling: the crickets and the birds—the chuck-will's-widows—had all fallen silent, as had the frogs in the swamps nearby. So had the dogs. Even the mosquitoes had ceased to buzz.

That did it; something was up. He had no choice but to investigate.

Sighing, he slid out from between the siblings, using the smooth, silent movements in which he took so much pride, and indeed he made no sound at all as he crept across the depression and snagged his sneakers—dread of what he might step on in the dark overriding his fear of noise. He made no move to put his shirt on, though, and the moonlight laid blue shadows across his body.

Moonlight was his friend, as was the night.

Still soundless, Calvin pushed through the bushes that fringed the camp and entered he forest.

It enfolded him like a brother, and he had a sudden urge to halt dead in his tracks and simply stand among the starlit trees while he slowly cleared his mind until there was nothing left but self, until he had no body and could simply drift away on the rising wind.

Almost without thinking, he found himself gripping the scale, and wondered, suddenly, if he could use it to achieve exactly that—abandon shape entirely, and become pure, mindless consciousness. But after a moment good sense got the better of him and he moved on, tiptoeing barefoot until he was out of range of the camp, then leaning against a maple to slip on his shoes. He was one with the night now, and from then on he knew he would make no sound.

He strained to catch the cries of the dogs again, but could not. The thrumming continued, though, like something drumming in the earth—no, it was more as if something bowed the ground, drew on its very structure to play a long, slow fiddle tune. There were almost words, too, a sort of sighing on the wind, but Calvin could not make them out. They had a direction, however—north-north west—and he followed them, slipping among the trees, letting the moonlight catch and blend their shadows with his own, sliding across his hair and down his shoulders, teasing him alive with light and wind.

He ran, then, as softly and nearly as swift as the deer he had recently been. On and on he trotted while the thrumming got fainter and fainter and finally faded away entirely. For a moment he halted, at a loss as to which way to continue, then shrugged and continued on, more or less the way he had been heading. He had slowed to a jog, though, ears ever alert for a resumption of the thrumming—until, quite suddenly, he found himself on the edge of a stream—very likely a tributary of good old Iodine Creek. At least the width looked about right, and there was the same sort of bank.

What
wasn't
right were the stones. Coastal south Georgia was flat, Calvin knew; had been underwater until fairly recently, thus the predominantly sandy soil. To hit rock worthy of the name you had to dig deep, and even then it was likely to be limestone.

Not handsome sandstone monoliths like those that reared up from the sandbar before him, gold-glimmering in the moonlight—impressive, yet somehow sinister as well, for each was taller than he was, and most were wider than his arms could span.

No way stones like these could be natural.

Indians, then? He tried to recall all he knew about aboriginal Indian stonework. He didn't think the native Yu-chi had worked stone, and was pretty sure they wouldn't have lugged boulders like these around without a very good reason. Maybe it was the folks who had built Rock Eagle away to the north, or the ones who'd piled the pseudo-forts on Fort Mountain.

Or perhaps it was none of these things—for Calvin could not put from his mind what he had sensed as he followed the thrumming: that something was playing with the forces of the earth itself. Maybe
that
was it; maybe something had
raised
these stones, dragged them up from the center of the world—or perhaps simply fused them together out of the abundant sand. The color was the same, in fact.

But who or what?

Was this what the omens had pointed to? If so, what did it portend? Did it mean anything at
all?

Or was he simply being paranoid again?

The trouble with magic was that once you knew it worked, you never quite trusted anything you saw afterward, especially if it was in any way out of the ordinary. But Calvin had also seen enough of hard-core mundane reality to know that plenty of remarkable things had perfectly natural explanations.

So, he supposed, the first thing to do was check out the stones. With that in mind, he slipped around the first one—and got a shock so strong that a low cry escaped him before he could suppress it.

The rocks constituted an irregular half-ring where they butted up against the stream. But to Calvin's left was a series of lower shelves, and on the bottommost lay the body of a small blond girl. She was naked, Calvin saw as he drew nearer, lying on her back as if in repose. Maybe about nine or ten—certainly younger than Brock, who claimed thirteen and looked eleven. Her face was pretty, her soft, smooth skin rendered smoother yet by the moonlight that caressed it and hid the pallor Calvin knew was there without bothering to check—perhaps because his senses were already so attuned to the night he could have heard the sound of her breathing had there been any. But the tiny chest did not rise and fall; the lips did not stir; the eyes did not twitch beneath their translucent lids.

The child was dead—but she had died in peace, that much he could tell by her expression. Yet it had not been natural causes, that much was equally clear. Calvin bent closer, scarcely daring to breathe lest he shatter the illusion—though his heart knew that was the thing he wished
would
happen, for no child as lovely as this should be dead. Closer, and he stood directly over her, trying very hard to fight the tears he felt welling up in his eyes, to banish the memories of his father the image before him suddenly evoked.

Logic advised that he get the hell out of there—an Indian boy caught looking at a naked dead white child in the middle of the night was a situation custom-made for trouble. But there was something about
this
night, this
place
;
something about its almost mystical stillness that made him linger a moment longer.

Soundlessly, Calvin knelt beside the child, and when he did, he noticed what she held in her nearer hand. It was a doll—a sort of articulated manikin—completely made of artfully jointed pebbles. In fact, when Calvin turned so the moonlight was full upon it, he could see that—though every form was made of unshaped rock—they were joined to each other in some way he could not make out so that they could move and twist like a natural body. There was something a little
too
strange about that, too. It smacked—there was no other word for it—of magic.

But magic or no, Calvin had to get word to the authorities, never mind what they might do to him. There were a thousand reasons to do so, most having to do with simple ethics, with doing “the right thing,” and trusting to the courts to acquit him of any improper allegations. And since he was on a Vision Quest, doing the Right Thing was very important. Trouble was, they were looking for him back in town, very likely had a murder warrant out on him, and if they had any sense really would have bloodhounds on his trail before long.

And now he, the fox, had to chase down the hounds! Because if there was one thing he could not do, it was to leave this poor child here for others to find Lord-knew-when.

He thought briefly of waking Brock and Robyn and dispatching them to phone in an anonymous tip, but quickly brushed that notion aside. They were in almost as much trouble as he was; no way he'd ask them to further risk themselves in his behalf.

But if something had killed this little girl, most especially if it was something supernatural, no way was he gonna leave the runaways unprotected. That, at least, he could do something about.

“A-wooo-ooooo-oooooo!”

Calvin almost jumped out of his skin, and whirled around just in time to see a large black-and-tan 'coon hound lope into the clearing. It paused when it saw him, staring soulfully at him with confused brown eyes that questioned his presence there.

“Easy, boy,” Calvin whispered, and began backing away, edging toward the encircling woods opposite the way the hound had entered. Evidently the monoliths had deadened sound somewhat, for now he was almost clear of them, he could make out the cacophony of the hunt at full cry—and growing closer by the instant. He hesitated, torn between the very reasonable desire to get the hell away from there, and curiosity. For the hound had lost all interest in him, was nosing around the little girl's body, yet keeping a certain distance, as if it mistrusted what it smelled. If it stayed there, Calvin now had every good reason to believe, the hunt would proceed no further.

As if in answer, the hound set back its head and bayed. The tone and cadence were different than earlier, though, and Calvin suspected the dog's owner would know what it implied.

Well, he supposed, if push came to shove, he could always change skin again. And with that in mind, Calvin slid back into the cover of the forest—but not so far he could not see or hear what went on inside the ominous stone circle.

He did not have long to wait, because the hound's belling was quickly joined by others, and an instant later, the sandbar was awash with canine bodies—tails wagging, pendulous ears flopping every which way. Most were black-and-tans, but there were a few redbones and blue-ticks as well, and—sure enough—a single treeing walker.