Ghostcountry's Wrath (35 page)

Calvin still looked somewhat shell-shocked—not without reason, Brock conceded. But then he took a deep breath, sat up very straight, and announced in an odd clear voice, “I, Nunda-unali' i, thank you for your courtesy, and I tell you now that there is only one thing I want, and if I am allowed that, my friends and I will leave this place as quickly as we can.”

“And what might that thing be?” Fatty replied.

“I have come here to Usunhiyi in search of my father's ghost, so that he can proceed in peace to whatever awaits him here and may trouble me no more in my World.”

“But what about—” Brock whispered into the ensuing pause.

“And further,” Calvin continued, ignoring him, “if I can make one request into two, I'd like to know where another unhappy spirit is. This one's a boy, but there may also be another boy from our World with him. That is all I ask; all I have to say.”

The brothers scowled at each other, then seemed to reach some unspoken accord and nodded. Red pointed to the escarpment behind the shelter, the one that overhung the stone buildings. “Follow that cliff left to where there is a crevice in the stone wide enough for one person to pass through at a time. Beyond it, you will find a plain wherein lies a river. This plain is called
Uyohusv'i-sisekayi:
the Place of the Waiting Dead. Go there, and when those you seek become restless, they will find you.”

“You have my thanks,” Calvin replied formally.
“Wado.”

“May your quest be successful, Nunda-unali'i,” Fatty replied, and rose. His brother joined him. “You may take the water jug if it pleases you,” he added. “And you may leave when you choose, though I would suggest you do it quickly. For now, my brother and I must be about our own business.”

“And the first thing we should be about,” his twin chimed in, “is to have a word with a certain rabbit.”

“Tell him I will taste his blood yet,” laughed Okacha.

Calvin, however, was silent until their hosts had stridden from sight behind the high stone wall. And then he only said, “Get me some pants and my boots, and let's travel.”

Chapter XVIII: Ghost of a Chance

“Damn!”
Calvin growled under his breath, as he pressed his shoulder blades hard up against the stone of the crevasse. “It wouldn't do for somebody
fat
to try to get through here!” And with that he sucked in his gut and pushed on to the right. But even so the stones of the opposite wall scraped his chest and thighs like dull knives as he continued down the defile toward the slit of dull-toned light gleaming tantalizingly five yards further on. Rock was inches from his nose, too: he could smell it here in the stuffy half-dark. But the scent of striated sandstone was now mingling with the odor of cedar and woodsmoke. He wondered what that portended.

“I'd presume that those who usually come this way are the dead,” Okacha noted from his left, sounding about as unhappy as a live person could. “I guess it's not a problem for them.” He didn't look back to check on her—probably couldn't have seen her anyway: Sandy's head was in the way, with Brock next in line.

“Fat people die, too,” Sandy muttered. Then: “Ouch!
Hell
!”
as a breast snagged on a sharp knob of stone Calvin had felt drag across his ribs seconds before.

“Just go
on
!”
Brock grumbled. “I'm gettin' claustrophobia here in the middle.”

“Be glad you're small,” Sandy told him smartly.

“Cool it, guys,” Calvin sighed an instant later, “we're through.” Sparing but the briefest glance over his shoulder, he led his companions once more into open air.

Behind him and ranking to the horizon on either side rose cliffs similar to the ones back at the arena, if a good bit taller, though still not impossibly high ones such as he half remembered from when he'd been a panther. These towered maybe a thousand feet, every inch fissured and striated and blasted into strange, linear sculptures by wind and sand.

And beyond, stretching flat and almost featureless as far as the oddly murky light allowed, lay a plain. The effect was desert, but while there was sand and what he assumed were rock outcrops, no dunes were evident, nor was there any sign of life, either animal or vegetable, save where a dark line parallel to the horizon roughly a half mile away might mark the skimpy vegetation along a riverbed. Across it, almost at the limits of vision—west, he assumed—he could dimly make out a range of mountains, visible most clearly when they were cut into relief by bright flashes of sheet lightning. Pinpricks of light dotting the space between might be fires. Thunder rolled in the distance, too; or perhaps that was drums. The wind was warm without being sticky and tight with the threat of rain.

Yet if it had ever rained here, Calvin doubted it, for beneath the glaze of sand that shrouded the ground lay what seemed to be a solid sheet of rock. No bare patches or swirl lines showed in either, nothing to indicate water had ever run there; indeed, nothing gave any hint nature had ever disturbed it.

—Except the footprints: millions upon millions of footprints. The majority were human, mostly bare. But there were animal tracks as well: panther, squirrel, deer—rabbit. He scowled at that last, and scowled harder when he followed a fresh set half a dozen paces and found them shifting size just in that small distance.

“Tsistu!” Okacha spat beside him. “Shit!”

Calvin did not reply. Instead, completely on impulse, he folded himself down where he stood and commenced removing his boots and socks. Somehow it didn't seem right that rubber and the designs of men should leave their mark on this place. His companions seemed to sense that, too, and followed his example.

Brock finished first and stood, gazing around. “Are those…buildings, or what?” he ventured in a whisper, which seemed the only appropriate form of vocalization in this land of perpetual gloom.

Calvin followed the boy's pointing finger along the line of the escarpment to where, maybe thirty yards to their right, the first of a series of buttresses flared out from the cliff base to comprise what looked like a row of roofless, open-fronted rooms, rather like, though he hated the simile, a ruined motel. Whether the partitions were natural or the work of hands, he couldn't tell.

Absently, he started that way—until a tug reined him back. “Hang on!” Sandy urged through a sudden yawn. “
You
got to rest back there with the boys; Brock and I haven't stopped since we got up.”

“Yeah, but
we
had to run after Tsistu!” Okacha growled back, though her face showed immediate regret at her sudden anger. “Sorry, 'bout that: I'm just real jumpy, I guess.”

Brock giggled. “Jumpy! Yeah, sure. Ha-ha!”

“Hush,” Calvin snapped, then yawned, too, feeling unaccountably tired. “Yeah, maybe we'd
better
cool our heels a spell.”

“The boys
said
the dead would find us anyway,” Brock reminded them, shuffling the short distance back to the cliff.

“Good point,” Calvin acknowledged. “I have to say it really is kinda peaceful here.”

Okacha yawned and stretched and, even human, looked very catlike. Calvin suppressed an urge to scratch behind her ears. At least she was wearing clothes again, even if, being Sandy's, they were a bit snug in places he didn't want to notice—or be seen noticing.

A second yawn found him. “Jesus,” he groaned as he joined Brock against the rockface and drew Sandy down beside him. “I really am gettin' droopy-eyed.”

“It's the air and the warmth and the hiss of the wind so low you can't really hear it,” Sandy replied. “The wind probably ionizes the air, and—”

“Hush,” Calvin murmured into her hair.

And did not resist when his eyelids drifted closed.

No!
he told himself as he jerked them open again. He couldn't sleep now! Not when he was on the verge of solving the major problem that had brought him here in the first place. On the other hand, it sure was nice just to lie here and rest and enjoy the simple comfort of friends and decent weather and a stomach that wasn't complaining.

NO!
he told himself again, and this time he sat up and blinked. And realized what was bugging him.

He had to take a leak.

Grimacing irritably, he eased Sandy's hand to the ground, rose as quietly as he could, and padded silently toward the nearest stone buttress, not so much for modesty as to mask any noise that might disturb his friends. He had already unzipped his fly when he stepped around it—

—And found himself in a forest! A tiny wooded glade, to be precise, scarcely larger than the open area around Sandy's cabin; walled on three sides by oaks so gnarled and twisted they looked like illustrations from one of Brian Froud's picture books, never mind the moss and shelf fungi and ferns with which they were encrusted. Around them frothed more ferns, waist-high at least, but those petered out in the open area he'd blundered into. There a stream wandered down from some unseen source higher up to tinkle and splash among boulders that were themselves half-hidden beneath a shawl of moss. The very air felt damp. Nor was there any sign of the desert, either before, around, or behind him.

He blinked.

When he blinked again, he saw the man.

He had stepped from behind the largest tree—so Calvin thought, already feeling his heart rate increase as he came on guard. He wished he'd brought the atasi, but it was back with the others. Oh, well, it was probably too late anyway, for the mist that had shrouded the man had floated away and Calvin could see him clearly.

Clad only in a buckskin loincloth, he was perhaps an inch taller than Calvin and more powerfully built, though a looseness softening those muscles and a trace of fat around that still mostly flat belly hinted at middle age and a dissipated life-style. His coppery skin was dark, but whether that was a function of Native blood or white suntan, he couldn't tell. The hair was shoulder long and black, however, which favored the former.

It hid his face, too, for the man was looking down as he calmly picked his way among the rocks and across the stream. But as he drew nearer, he twisted just enough for Calvin to note a thin dark line on his right side just below his ribs: a line from which a steady trickle of red blood oozed.

And then the man looked up, and Calvin saw his face: Native American for sure; Cherokee, quite possibly. In fact, it looked like…

“Dad!” Calvin burst out before he could stop himself.

“Calvin?”
Brown eyes brightened hopefully.

Calvin was at once dumfounded, relieved, and scared out of his skin. The result manifested as inarticulate nervousness. “Uh, jeez, well…uh, how're you doin'?” he managed finally, serving up the first reasonable phrase that fought its way to his tongue. A lump formed in his throat, all unbidden. His eyes misted—or perhaps that was the humidity. He was briefly dizzy.

“I'm fine—as fine as I can be,” his father replied easily. “
You
look like you oughta sit down, though.”

Calvin nodded, wide-eyed. “I prob'ly look like I've just seen a ghost—or am seein' one,” he gulped, and felt immediately like a fool.

“Just think of me as your dad,” the man told him. “Think of me as plain old Maurice McIntosh dressed up in funny clothes—or dressed down, I guess you oughta say.”

Calvin chuckled nervously, but managed to grope his way to find a stone of the proper height. The moss prickled beneath his palms as he braced against it. His father chose one opposite. “It's a lot easier here to think of folks as themselves than as
what
they are. I mean, how often do you think of somebody alive as a human bein' 'stead of Joe or Jane or Jeffrey?”

Calvin couldn't help but smile. “You've turned into a poet—or a philosopher.”

“I've turned into nothin' I wasn't before,” Maurice replied sharply, but with a trace of sadness. “You just never bothered to find out what I was. You were too busy tryin' to find out what
you
were to check. All you knew was that I wasn't what you wanted me to be. You never looked beyond that to see what I was.”

Calvin swallowed hard and had to force himself to meet his father's gaze. “I—I'm sorry. I never thought of it that way. But I didn't come here to argue.”

“Statin' facts ain't arguin'.”

“No, I guess it's not.”

“I've missed you…son.”

Another swallow. “So I gathered.”

Maurcie stared at him intently. “I'm sorry I deviled you like I did, boy—but I just felt like I had to. I'm stuck here, see; I'm stuck and can't go either way. There's ways I could've died and it would've been no problem—a car wreck, or sickness, or something like that. But the
way
I died… Well, it's not a matter of the body parts, exactly—I mean they take things out when they embalm you, and all. But
that
part of me was removed in a way that's part of the heart and soul of our people—and
my
soul—my
real
soul—my center-thing—knows it and won't let me go on. It's not really the Black Man doin' it—not his fault anyway. He just knows that I won't be satisfied long as I know I lost part of myself the wrong way. Which is kinda funny, if you think about it.”