Shadow Woman (12 page)

“Then why aren’t you
happy?”

She sat down on the bed facing
away from him to comb her hair so he couldn’t see her. “I
was thinking about them. Hatcher and that woman. It’s such a
simple trick, and I’ll bet when they thought of it they were
laughing at us.”

Jane
heard a noise in the dark outside. She sat up and listened. The noise
came again. She crept to the wall beside the bedroom window and
leaned slowly to the side to bring one eye to the edge of the curtain
to see. The wind was blowing from the east, making the long,
leg-thick limb of the old maple tree behind the house bob its heavy
foliage up and down. When it moved, there was a creak. There it was
again, a rubbing sound that came once, then was quiet, a sound an
intruder would make while he slipped into the house.

She stepped back from the window
and watched the soft, hot wind blow the curtain inward so a little
glow of moonlight showed her the room. Sprawled on the other side of
the bed was Carey, his eyes closed and his jaw slack in an
almost-snore, a long silence and then, after it seemed too late, a
soft, gentle indrawing of breath. She admitted to herself that she
would probably wake up this way for a few more months. She had slept
– happily fallen asleep – beside a few men over the
years, and Carey was one of them. But now she was sleeping in Carey’s
bed in the house where Carey had been a baby, which was now her house
too. She had been in another life too long, a place where noises that
might be intruders didn’t always turn out to be made by the
wind. She sat on the bed and spent a minute staring at him. She let
herself adore the big foot sticking out from under the sheet, the
long, hard muscles of the arm. She leaned over to stare at his
eyelids. She could see his eyes moving in little nervous twitches
underneath, and she knew he was dreaming.

She resisted the urge to touch
him. She was his wife now, and that was different. She was supposed
to take responsibility for the fact that he had to be at the hospital
at six if he was going into surgery at seven, not wake him up and ask
him what he was dreaming. She slowly lowered herself beside him, then
lay on her back, closed her eyes, and listened to the wind fluttering
the leaves of the maple outside the window until they made no sound.

After a time, she sensed from
the way that the trees around her kept revising their shapes until
she got them right that she was in a dream. It was night, and low,
thin clouds made the moon a small ball with a rainbow ring around it.
She didn’t like the dream, but when she tried to fathom why
that was, she found she had already known the answer before she had
wondered. It was because the place where she was standing was
familiar. She had not moved. She was still on the ground where
Carey’s house was going to be built some day.

She felt uneasy as she looked
toward the street, because she saw only a narrow gap in the trees.
There was no use trying to walk and find her way home, because if the
path was there, the road was not yet on top of it, and the forest
still stretched like this from the ocean to the Mississippi, and from
the tundra to the Gulf of Mexico.

Jane tried to fight the growing
sensation that she was being watched. She tried to force herself to
be rational. This might be die Old Time, but that didn’t mean
there were such things as witches. There were no witches. If there
ever had been, they had disappeared from the earth before Jane had
been born. But her own memory told her she was lying.

She had been in the courtroom in
Atlanta when the judge had looked past little Max Curtin, who sat
behind the table that came up nearly to his chin, not seeing his pale
face and thin bird-bones showing he hadn’t just fallen down a
lot but had not even been given enough to eat. The judge could see no
grounds to take him away from his cousin. But the cousin had heard
the words, and turned around quickly to gaze at Max Curtin’s
face, and the cousin’s eyes had glowed, not only in triumph,
but because he was drinking in the sight of the terror and despair
that showed in the little boy’s face. The Grandfathers would
have taken one look at the cousin and known he was a witch.

She could feel the Workers of
Evil were out there, feel them turning their attention to her. She
had been thinking about them, and they had heard her thoughts, and
now they were looking up, their faces vacant but alert. They were
somewhere in the forest, and they began to turn and move toward her.
She could feel the emptiness that was in them begin to fill up with
excitement, anticipation. They were concentrating on her now,
thinking about how happy she had been, and how easily that could be
taken away from her. And they were coming.

Jane caught herself worrying
about Carey sleeping unprotected in his bed, and she felt a jab of
alarm. She had to force herself to hide him in the back of her mind,
where they would not find him. She turned her attention to the
witches. As long as she concentrated on them, they would see only
their own reflection in her mind. There had seemed to be dozens of
them when she first had thought of them, all pricking up their ears
to search the air for her. But now she saw that they had winnowed
themselves down to just two. Because they stood for all witches, they
had to be a man and a woman.

There were footprints on the
path, so sooner or later it had to lead to a place where people
lived. Jane set off and followed it, then worked up to a run. It was
hard for Jane to run on the trail at night, and she was ashamed of
how clumsy she had become. She had been lazy for the past three
months, and she began to get winded after only a hundred yards. Her
foot hit the edge of the path, where it was higher, and she tripped.
She gave a little gasp of surprise, and she knew it had reached the
man and the woman and told them she had been flushed from hiding.

Although they were far behind
her, only now reaching the clearing where she had started, she had no
trouble seeing them. The man burst through the bushes, breaking
branches and trampling the brush at his feet. He saw the path. He
hunched over and stared down to read it for fresh tracks. He leaned
forward on his knuckles, and his heels came up like those of a runner
at the starting blocks. He grinned with a horrible emotion that
looked like appetite, and his grin changed him. His lips kept moving,
curled upward, and his bared teeth seemed to grow. His heavy jaw
thickened, and he sprouted hair along his back, and then his haunches
and arms. His small, black eyes lost none of their intensity as he
started to move along the path on four feet.

The woman was quiet. She seemed
to materialize out of the forest without moving a leaf, as though her
feet didn’t quite touch the ground. She stood still for a few
breaths, listening. Jane didn’t let herself think about what
the woman was sensing about that place, but it was why Jane was
trying to draw her away from there. The woman didn’t hurry. She
watched the man lumbering away down the path, growing bigger and
heavier, his claws now long and black and the fur thick and
impenetrable. He was a wolf.

The woman smiled to herself and
held her arms up, her long, graceful fingers fanned out, made longer
by her pointed nails. She looked up at the moon glowing through the
clouds, ringed with the faint colors of the spectrum, and as she did,
she seemed to rise. Her fingers were impossibly long now, her neck
was elongated to look upward, and her face in the moonlight was
beautiful and ghostly. The bright, liquid eyes opened wider.

Jane could see the fingers were
the shafts of feathers, and she watched the feathers spread along the
woman’s forearms and then all the way to her shoulders. The
woman’s skin glowed white and smooth and flawless, and she had
a soft, shapely grace that made Jane not want to turn her attention
away. The arms were definitely wings now. The woman’s white
neck seemed to curve, stretching up toward the moon, and Jane’s
heart beat faster – a swan! In the old stories, swans were
never evil. As soon as Jane allowed herself to feel hope, it expanded
in her chest and she almost cried with joy. The female apparition
wasn’t a witch at all. She was probably some powerful woman
asleep somewhere, who was now entering Jane’s dream to help
her. Jane had acquired an ally, a sister.

But the woman’s face had
not stopped changing. The eyes kept growing bigger and brighter, and
now they seemed to ignite, to burn with a light from inside that
looked like fire. Suddenly the woman ducked forward in some wrenching
physical reflex like a retch. Her shoulders shrugged, her neck
shortened, the flesh of her feet shriveled and left only curved
talons. She was no longer human. She gave the great wings a flap, and
she soared into the dark sky. She was an owl.

Jane was stung with shock, and
in a few seconds the hurt threatened to soften and degenerate into
heavy-footed despair. She strained to run harder, staring at the
darkness ahead to discern the deeper black of the trail ahead of her
feet, the empty air between the trees that could show her the way.

Jane could hear the wolf behind
her and to her right, his body lean and hard but heavy, crashing
through the underbrush. He knew the path because he was a human, and
he was cutting across the curves. Jane stepped off the path and ran
to the right, into the cover of the forest. She had to go more slowly
now, slipping through thickets, sliding down inclines and then
straining to scramble up the next rise, tiring herself just to get to
level ground again. At the bottom of a steep, rocky hill she found
the beginning of a stream. She turned with it and trotted for a few
hundred paces, splashing along the stony creekbed until she came
abreast of a rocky ledge and pulled herself up onto it just because
it was difficult and the wolf would expect her to avoid it. Then she
shifted her course toward the path, and in another mile she came out
onto it again. She knew she had fooled the wolf. Her feet seemed
light, running on the clear, even ground.

Then she felt rather than heard
the sound above her, not so much a sound as a displacement of air
behind her neck. She took two more steps and then whirled and swung
hard at the same time so it would be her fist that arrived first
instead of her face. Her knuckle felt the soft, downy brush of the
breast feathers but swept past, hitting nothing solid at all.

The owl rose high into the air
and a high-pitched screech came from its throat, then echoed from the
rocky glen Jane had just left. The owl circled above her and called
again. Jane could hear the sound of the wolf’s claws scraping
the stones as it came up out of the gully, then heavy paws thumping
the leafy ground, and the grunting breaths growing louder.

Jane turned again and ran. There
was no concealment now, because the owl flew low under the canopy of
trees, its wings flapping only to make the curves, sometimes a few
feet behind and sometimes so close that Jane turned to strike out at
it, but always screaming with that almost-human voice to tell the
wolf where she was.

Jane ran with a sob in her
voice, feeling the futility of it. An owl could see better than she
could, and easily avoided her blows, and a wolf could run all night
if it could smell its prey. As soon as she had thought of smelling,
she imagined she smelled something pungent in the air. Was it
something she had invented because she wanted it so much, or was it
really smoke? It must be smoke. All she had to do was follow the
smoke to the village, a clearing somewhere ahead where people slept
in their longhouses and tended their crops and made love and sang.
All she had to do was reach a circle of light. She ran beside the
path, weaving in and out of the big trees so the owl couldn’t
swoop in behind her neck with its talons.

The owl seemed to sense that it
didn’t have much time. Maybe it smelled the smoke too, and
maybe it had known where the village was. It stopped screeching and
swooped upward.

Jane stepped back onto the path
and sprinted, lengthening her strides and holding her head high to
open the airway, pumping her arms and knees. She smelled the smoke
more strongly now, and she knew she was close. She would dash for the
nearest longhouse, duck under the bearskin flap that covered the
door, dive through the little anteroom where the corn and beans and
squash were stored, and roll into the little circle of light thrown
off by the first cooking fire.

She could see a sharp
off-turning in the trail ahead, and she knew this must be the path
that led up to the village. She cut across a patch of low
three-leafed plants she thought were strawberries, but as her ankles
slashed through, her skin began to burn. It was poison ivy, but she
didn’t care. She dashed up the path, climbing higher and
higher. She reached the little plateau on top and stopped.

There, in the clearing, was a
strange, horrible sight. The wolf had begun to change back into a
man, and he squatted on human legs beside a pile of green brush that
he had half-ignited with his human hands. It was smoking heavily but
giving off no light at all. The man stood and turned his wolf snout
toward her. She could see the sharp yellow teeth and the eyes that
gleamed like pale gold-green beads. “Hello, Jane,” he
said. “Smell the smoke?”

Jane heard something behind her.
The owl alit and began to change back into a woman. “You’re
ours now.”

“No.”

“We’re going to make
you into a skin woman. He’ll flay the skin off you carefully,
and I’ll sew it back together, and we’ll hang you from
that tree limb over there. The soft breeze will fill you up a little
and there will be a sound like a quiet song coming from your mouth.
People passing by on the trail will look up this path and see you.
Maybe they’ll just want to pass the time, and maybe they’ll
be alone and running, looking for a place to rest and someone to help
them. But they’ll stop. They’ll step off the trail and up
this little path alone.”