Ghostcountry's Wrath (36 page)

Calvin stared at him perplexedly. “How so?”

“'Cause I never
believed
that stuff! Shoot, I never liked any of that stuff, never liked bein' an Indian, which I'm sure you know. But deep down in my center I believed. Deep down in my
center
I wanted Spearfinger to be real. Deep down I wanted to be everything I tried to keep you from bein' cause I thought even knowin' it existed would make you want it—only most folks wouldn't understand it, and therefore wouldn't understand you if you wanted it or made yourself part of it, and therefore you'd be unhappy.”

“I…understand, I think,” Calvin whispered.

“I
hope
you do, boy!” Maurice shot back fiercely. “'Cause I've been tryin' to figure out how to explain it to you ever since you walked out that door when you were sixteen and said you were gonna go find your real self, were gonna
be
your real self or die tryin'. I let you go 'cause I knew I couldn't stop you and have anything good come of it. But ever since then I've spent every day tryin' to think of exactly the right way to explain why I'm like I am and why I raised you like I did, so you'd understand without doubt or distance. Why, I've probably thought enough words to fill a million books if they was all wrote down—and I
still
don't have 'em. But I know you've come far since you left, and have made a man like there ain't been in five hundred years of our people—ever since they got to
be
our people. And I know that you're a much better man than you'd ever've been if you'd done what I wanted you to. I'm proud of you, son—and I know you're the one who can help me.”

“I'll try,” Calvin replied helplessly. “I'm not sure that I can. I—”

“One other thing,” Maurice broke in. “Two other things, that is.”

“What?”

“Like I said, I'm sorry if I bothered you, but you don't know how lonely it is here when there's nobody much to talk to; and you can't go
on
'cause
the Black Man doesn't want your pissin' and moanin' upsettin' the folks he's gotta look out for until they decide to go around again; and you can't really go
back
'cause
you just ain't supposed to. It's the loneliest thing in the world, son—shoot, in the Worlds!”

Calvin simply stared. “You know about
them
?”

A shrug. “Everybody does; they just don't all know they know.”

“What was the other thing?”

“I'm sorry I was a bad father. I'm sorry I didn't listen and tried to cut out your heart to save your head.”

“It's fine,” Calvin murmured. “I'm sorry, too.”

“Why?”

Calvin had to blink through tears. “For bein' a bad son. For not listenin', for not respectin' my elders, for payin' too much heed to the message and not to the messenger.”

“It worked out okay, though.”

A sniff. “Did it? You're here, and that really
is
my fault.”

A shrug. “You were tryin' to do good. You had no way of knowin'.”

Calvin wiped his eyes. “No, you're wrong there. I
could've
known 'cause I could've thought things out more clearly. I was actin' on impulse, and that'll get you killed. Except that it killed you and a bunch of other folks instead, and that's even worse.”

“Folks die, Cal,” his father said simply. “I'd rather die like I did than in a car wreck on 285 or by fallin' off a skyscraper down in Atlanta. Shoot, ain't nobody died like
I
did in two hundred years—not since they moved Galunlati away from the Lyin' World.”

“Nobody but that woman and those kids.”

“Yeah, but I was the first of
our
folks. That's something.”

Calvin started. “You just called it the Lying World? Where'd you hear that?”

“Folks talk—not enough to keep me from gettin' lonely, 'cause they don't stay when they cross here, most of 'em. But they talk. The Black Man comes sometimes. Sometimes I talk to Kanati's boys—when they're not makin' thunder.”

Calvin looked at him askance. “Red kid and black kid?”

Maurice nodded.

“I thought so.”

Silence.

“Am I awake?” Calvin asked suddenly.

His father smiled. “You're too alive for us to meet, with you awake. Sleep's the closest thing to death anybody alive knows. Figure the rest out for yourself.”

“But you're still here?”

“The only part of me that matters is.”

“So, how do we finish you up so you can move on?”

“I've been wonderin' about that myself.”

Calvin's mouth dropped open. “You mean you don't
know
? But you said for me to help you! That I was the only one who could!”

“And you can! Only…I don't know
how—
'cept
that I just know it.”

Calvin gnawed his lip. “But didn't you say it was mostly in your mind? That it doesn't matter to the Black Man, except that it matters to you?”

A nod. “More or less. But it really
does
matter. It matters so far down in my
self
I don't even know it matters. It's like the same way I
know
you can help me—”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“And I'm not sure I can explain—except, well, haven't you ever had to act so different from what you really were you
forgot
what you were and started believin' your own lies? Like, say you had a girlfriend who liked cats, but you couldn't stand 'em, only you liked that girlfriend a whole lot, so you pretended you liked cats, and pretty soon you got so used to pretendin' you liked cats you forgot you really didn't. Only the part deep down still don't like 'em. Your head thinks you do, but your heart knows better. Well, my head hated the myths, but my heart wanted 'em: wanted things like liver-eatin' shapechangers to be real, just so I'd know something most folks didn't and be a little bit special in a world that says it loves special things but really hates 'em.”

“But,” Calvin began slowly, “how can a…ghost lack a liver when your physical body's somewhere else? I mean, you
were
buried; your liver's— Well, it was in Spearfinger's gut when she died, so I guess it…dissolved when she did.”

Another shrug. “That's a hard 'un, son.”

“Tell me about it!”

“I can't—unless it's like I was sayin': it's the old head/heart thing. My head—my mind—remembers my body as it was supposed to be: complete and entire. But my soul knows what really happened and remembers it another way.”

Calvin puffed his cheeks. “I…think I see,” he ventured finally. “My friend Dave's talked a little about it. He knows these folks called the Sidhe—they're the Irish faeries; we've got folks like 'em in our folklore, only they're not myths, I guess, are they? But anyway, the Sidhe live in a World that touches the one we're from, just like this one does, only somewhere else. And they've got physical existence—real bodies—in both Worlds. Only to stay any length of time in any World but the one they're native to, they have to put on the substance of that World—which I guess means that the soul really is separate from the body and can wear the substance of whatever World it's in—and has to, to stay there.”

“So I'm wearin' the substance of Tsusginai, then?”

Calvin nodded. “I guess. Your soul built it. But it's as physical in this place as your other one was to our world.”

“'Cept that my soul remembers me without a liver, so I don't have one?”

Another nod. “I—”

“Hang on a minute,” his father interrupted. Calvin blinked at him, startled, as his father reached forward and with a soft touch of his fingers brushed a lock of Calvin's hair away from his forehead.

“What?” Calvin wondered, frowning.

“That scar you got playin' anetsa when you was a kid—the ten-stitch job up at your hairline:—it's gone.”

Calvin felt for the tiny ridge that had been there at least ten years. He rarely noticed it because of the way he wore his hair. But now that he probed at it—he couldn't find it.

And then he remembered.

“It's the scale,” he blurted out, even as he withdrew the uktena scale from around his throat. “That, or the shapeshifting it lets me do. See, everytime I change back to human and it rebuilds me out of…whatever it rebuilds me from, my genes only remember me as the blueprint says I oughta be, so it puts me back that way: no cavities in my teeth, no eyes ruined by readin', and all that. I mean, my foreskin's even growin' back, and I bet I've halfway got an appendix. I had a couple of cracked ribs a day ago, too. And of course it takes care of scars.”

His father was staring at him intently. “And I'll bet if I shifted back and forth a few times it could grow me a brand new liver!”

A sick dread sneaked into Calvin's gut: relief and apprehension both. “Maybe,” he said carefully, “
if
it's got enough charges left in it. Uki told me to be real careful, that it was runnin' low.”

“What happens then?”

“You could get stuck in animal shape and not be able to get back.”

“Could be worse.”

Calvin eyed him dubiously, then looked back at the scale. “If you wear animal shape too long, you forget you were ever human.”

His father's face was calm, but his eyes were on fire. “I'd risk it. It'd beat bein' like I am.”

“No!” Calvin cried, rising. “I can't let you. I—” He broke off, for he had noticed something terrible. “This isn't my scale!” he groaned.

Chapter XIX: A Dream Within a Dream

Calvin wasn't certain which
him
it was that gazed down at Brock a moment later. Perhaps it was his dream-self, perhaps the “real” him—did it really matter? The prevailing certainty was that the boy still lay where he'd left him: curled into a tight fetal crescent at Sandy's side, close by the base of the preposterous cliff. He was snoring softly. For her part, Sandy slept in a surprisingly trusting sprawl, looking far more relaxed—and vulnerable—than she had when awake. And Okacha—she was also curled up, but catlike: poised. If she'd sported a tail instead of tight jeans, Calvin suspected it would have twitched. He chuckled at the notion.

He
wasn't present, however—fortunately. Which mostly meant he was spared one batch of metaphysical conundrums, which in turn made it that much easier to focus on the task at hand.

“Brock,” he hissed softly. Then, more sharply: “Brock!”

The boy twitched and moaned and shifted to a more comfortable position.

“Brock!”

“Wha—? Huh?” And this time his eyes slitted open.

Calvin squatted beside him and shook him roughly. “My scale.”

The boy twisted up on his elbow. “W-what scale?”

Calvin grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked him to his feet, then dragged him toward the impossible glade where he had left his father. The boy gaped, yawned, not having regained full awareness. “
What
scale?” he repeated sleepily, still barely able to stand.

When he thought he was far enough from the women to risk raising his voice, Calvin slammed Brock against the cliff—not hard enough to hurt him, but with sufficient force to get his attention. While the boy stared and blinked, Calvin flourished the uktena scale before his startled eyes. “This isn't mine!” he snapped. “And since it
was
mine when I gave it to Sandy, and she's not the kind to play games, and you were the only one who was actually alone with it, it has to be you that swapped 'em!”

Brock had regained some composure by then, and with it a touch of his old surliness. “It didn't hurt anything.”

“Where's
mine,
dammit!”

Brock fished in a pocket. “Here.” He passed a second scale—minus wire winding and thong—to Calvin, who couldn't help but compare the replacement with the original. He understood how he'd been beguiled, too; for side by side the two were nearly identical. “Sorry,” Brock mumbled. “I was tryin' to help.”

Calvin glared at him. “By riskin' us all?”

The boy avoided his gaze. “It was spur of the moment. I didn't think.”

“Obviously!”

Blue eyes met Calvin's, then; flashed fire. “Cool it,
okay
? Everything worked out, and we've saved some changes.”